🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan12.023957.14993@math.ucla.edu>
barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:
> In article <1iskmhINNokt@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu> jwe@che.utexas.edu
> (John W. Eaton) writes:
>
>> Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical
>> computations.  It provides a convenient command line interface for
>> solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically.
>
> What would be the advantage (besides $) of Octave over 
> Maple/Mathematica/MATLAB ?

Among other things, you get the source, so you can tinker with it if
you like.  If you make useful changes, you are free (and encouraged!)
to share them with everyone else.

In addition, there are a number of other minor features that I find
attractive:

  * You can choose whether you want assignment to an element of a
    matrix that is currently out of bounds to resize the matrix or
    produce a range error.

  * You can choose to have statements like
      clear a; for i = 1:5, a(i) = i; end
    produce column vectors or row vectors.

  * You can choose to disallow Fortran-style indexing of two
    dimensional matrices so that statements like
      a = [1,2;3,4]; a(2)
    produce errors.

  * Some Matlab functions (e.g., eye) will take negative arguments and
    treat them as 0.  Octave allows you to make this an error.

  * Some Matlab functions (e.g., eye) will take complex arguments and
    throw away the imaginary part.  Octave allows you to make this an
    error.

  * The ODE solver (LSODE) is built in to the interpreter, and there
    is a DAE solver (DASSL) that is also built in.

I also prefer the command line editing and history mechanism of
Octave, because it uses real Emacs-style keybindings and works just
like my shell (bash), and because the command history is saved between
sessions.

Octave doesn't have any symbolic capability (yet :-) so it is much
different from Maple or Mathematica.  Since Octave is intended for
numerical computations, one might find it to be more suitable for
those tasks than symbolic processors.

Whether these things are advantages is for you to decide :-).

--
Virtually all of the programs obtained by our sampling | John W. Eaton
procedure were written in FORTRAN.  -- Donald E. Knuth | jwe@che.utexas.edu