Re: Support

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On 11/30/12 09:07, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 29 November 2012 21:39, Stephen Montgomery-Smith
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > (That is, personally I find matlab documentation much better than octave
> > documentation, and since octave is compatible with matlab, you may as
> > well use the matlab help pages.)
>
> If you could help us improve Octave's documentation, that would be
> appreciated. Just write or amend the text as you deem necessary, and I
> can incorporate it into the Octave manual. For the Octave wiki, you
> can edit it yourself.

I don't think it is a negative reflection on Octave that Matlab's 
documentation is better.  I wasn't trying to make a snide comment at 
Octave's expense.  All I was trying to do was to help this user find 
good information on how to use fft.  And since the Matlab documentation 
is available for free, it makes sense to point the user to that page. 
And since Matlab has done such a fantastic job with their documentation, 
I don't see a need to reproduce what they have done.

There was also some advice that the user could look up the fftw 
documentation.  I have looked at that documentation a lot, because I 
have used fftw in some C code I have written.  It is very thorough, but 
it is not a good place for a casual user to find out how fft in Octave 
works.

I taught a class on Math modeling last semester.  I told the students to 
code using Octave, but to use google as their manual.  (And they were 
allowed to use Matlab if they had access to it, but the University of 
Missouri doesn't have a site license for Matlab.)