regexp & COM: matlab compatibility

[Andrew Hancock]

I'm just discovering regular expressions in Matlab, and the named
tokens is especially impressive.  I am thrilled to see regexp in
Octave as well.  From perusing the documention, it look very similar
(if not identical) to Matlab.  I did a search to see if the intent is
to compatible with Matlab, and it seems (from google hits on the
developer forum) that it is.  Can anyone chime in to confirm?

Finally, I didn't find anything about Active-X / COM interface to
(say) Excel (something else that I'm slowly getting up to speed on).
I would be surprised if it did, because it is very Microsoft-specific.
 Is it correct to assume that this not in the plans?