Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations

[c.]

On 21 Nov 2012, at 18:38, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:

> That is all true, but in many cases the data has to come from somewhere.
> When it comes from other applications, it comes in files in various
> formats, and that's when you start hating Jordi's #3 and 4 (and also #1
> and 9).

Indeed, so just use some other tool for doing the conversion to and from 
formats that Octave likes, rather than trying to use Octave's (limited) 
data structures for tasks they are not meant to accomplish.
Think of Octave as  essentially being able to deal with arrays of numbers 
and little more [*].

> And as I said before, when some poor shmuck is handled a bunch of matlab
> 7.3 scripts that don't even run in 2011b and is told to run that from a
> web form, #0, 5, and 6 make sure that isn't doable.

Possibly true, but my point was that, although he does have my sympathy,
Matlab does not market to that "poor shmuck" ...

Matlab has become a de-facto standard by providing an environment where it 
is easy to implement complex numerical algortihms without much knowledge of 
complex data structures. This ease of use did come at a cost but, on the other 
hand, it has facilitated the implementation of a huge amount of clever and 
useful programs written by people who would not have taken the effort to do 
so in a different language. 

As I see it, Octave's purpose is to make available a similarly convenient 
number 
crunching environment to those users that are not willing to trade Freedom for 
ease 
of use, so it might deviate from Matlab's syntax now and then but I don't think
it would make sense to try and tronsform it into a general purpose.

c.

P.S. On a side note, as you seem to like Python but have to deal with other 
people's
code written in Octave, have you ever considered using Pytave 
<https://launchpad.net/pytave> ?


[*] That is of course an over-simplification but if you keep low expectations 
you sure will
never be disappointed ;)