a wrapper for octave

[Juan Garcia de Arboleya]

Hi everybody

This is a project that I have started some days ago. The original idea was to 
have a shell that can connect at the same time to Octave and to Scilab, and 
to distribute the work among them, according to their possibilities.

Anyway, this approach has other advantages:

- The shell can also connect to other external programs (gnuplot, plplot and 
wish) for displaying graphics or even widgets. Therefore it will be able to 
simulate the matlab user interface calls (uimenu, etc) using a tcl/tk 
interpreter, or to substitute gnuplot by plplot with no modifications inside 
octave.

- The core programers (octave, scilab) will not have to worry anymore about 
the user interface.

- They will not have to worry anymore about matlab compatibility. It can be 
reached parsing the request in the shell and converting it into other calls. 
Therefore they can improve the system as they wish without loosing 
compatibility.

- It will allow some kind of paralelism, if we connect several servers (octave 
or scilab) to the sell (though it will be needed for this some way to monitor 
the CPU load of the remote computers)

- It will allow to use both sets of libraries at the same time, which is 
important being faster octave but more complete scilab.

By now I have only done a prototype written in bash shell language. It is able 
to connect to wish(tcl/tk), octave and gnuplot, but I think is enough for 
showing the idea. I would like people to try it and to send me back comments, 
suggestions, etc (you can also improve it, of course)

For trying it, first you should check that gnuplot, wish and octave run 
properly in your system. Then you only have to copy the attached files onto a 
directory and to run "runme".
The shell connects to the programs using fifos in the disk. Maybe you will 
have to remove them by hand after trying.

The only three commands that work by now are plot for gnuplot, figure for wish 
and the octave commands should run all of them. I have tried this:

>> plot sin(x)
>> i = figure
>> t=[1:10]
>> fft(t,10)

all the three have work in my computer (redhat linux 8.0). I would like to 
hear about other systems. Be carefull because in the previous example i is an 
internal variable of my shell while t is in octave space. I plan to keep a 
cache in the shell of the matlab variables and retrieve them from octave when 
they are not in the cache.

You can consider it under GNU public license or BSD, as you wish.

for contacting me:

address@hidden

Juan Garcia Arboleya.
2003

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