Loading of Matlab 5 files

[Steven N Harp]

I sent inadvertently sent the message to jwe only, If anyone on the
list has looked at this problem or has any new information I would
appreciate hearing about it.

Steve Harp

 

On 18-Feb-1998, Steven N Harp <address@hidden> wrote:

| Yesterday I tried to load some .mat files in octave and the load
| failed. After a little thought I remembered seeing some information a
| while back about a change in the mat format for Matlab version 5 and
| not being able to load this files into octave. I searched through the
| old postings and found out there the Mathworks has ( or had) some code 
| that could be used in developing programs to load Matlab 5
| files. However there was some discussion about the conflict of using
| the Mathworks code in octave and violation of the GPL. After that it
| appears the topic died.
| 
| Is there any method to load Matlab 5 mat file into octave-2.10 ?
| 
| If not has anyone looked into this problem?
| 
| If the specification for the file format is known and code was written 
| from scratch to read these files would that be an acceptable, under
| the GPL, solution.

I just noticed that you sent your message to help-octve-request, so it
was only sent to me.

If you want to send it to the list, please resend it to
address@hidden

My answer for your question is that if the file format is published
somewhere, and someone writes freely available code to read it, then I
will consider including it with the normal Octave releases.
Otherwise, there's not much I can do.  We can't link proprietary code
with Octave.

jwe