Re: Moving functions from octave-forge to octave

[Ronald]

I think it would improve Matlab compatibility and user experience. Matlab
provides these functions out of the box, and therefore I think it would be
a good thing if octave would too.

It is not obvious for people not familiar with Octave to install e.g. the
io or windows packages when their Matlab scripts fail in Octave. Sure, you
could argue that they should rtfm or read up on Octave. I think they should
too, but rather because they want to do new interesting things with Octave
rather than make their existing scripts work.

I can see why you would not want platform specific functions. But I would
personally think this would be acceptable in favor of compatibility/user
experience.

What do you mean with "involved"? That it depends on things you would not
want as dependancies? Or that it is complex and may be hard to maintain? Or
that it may behave different (even though it works better than Matlab) on
different platforms?

--Ronald

Op 3 jul. 2014 18:07 schreef "Philip Nienhuis [via Octave]" <
address@hidden>:
>>
>> Ronald wrote
>> I read a quote from a 2007 thread of John W. Eaton saying:
>> "any function currently in an Octave Forge package that is in
>> the list of core Matlab functions is a candidate for moving to
>> Octave"
>>
>> So I was wondering if the actxserver function from the windows package
>> shouldn't be moved to the Octave.
>>
>> And what about others like for example xlsread and xlswrite from the io
package?
>>
>> What would be the criteria for moving an Octave Forge function to Octave?
>
> I suppose one of the criteria is that core Octave functions should not be
bound to a specific platform.
> Now, actxserver (a sort of "system library") runs only on Windows, so
there you go.
>
> As to xlsread and xlswrite: the way they are coded now is quite involved,
precisely because they should be able to work on about any platform
(currently xlsread/-write can also process gnumeric and ODS). In this way
the Octave versions are much more flexible than their Matlab counterparts;
e.g. AFAIK on Mac OSX or Linux Matlab's xlswrite doesn't work very well, if
it works at all. In that sense, ML is way behind Octave.
> The way Octave's spreadsheet functions are offered now, included in an
add-on package, is probably the best solution in the foreseeable future.
>
> What is it you think you will gain with moving them into core Octave?
>
> Philip
>
>
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