Re: compiling .m files

[John W. Eaton]

On 13-Nov-2002, Arnim Littek <address@hidden> wrote:

| I note that the original MATCOM stuff what written by a bright spark
| from the Technion, and was originally released under some form of
| freebie licence.  The Unix version thereof (dating from late 1995)
| came in source form, and recently I've tried to find it, but the only
| copy I've found is a corrupt tarball, so I can't comment any further
| on the licensing of it.
| 
| Maybe someone else has squirreled away a copy of matsrc.Z from 1995
| and can cast more light on using this as a starting point, since it
| was written for Matlab V4...

As I recall, it was released as "free" software but the source was
heavily obfuscated.  It seemed clear to me that they were not
interested in free software, but free debugging/beta testers via the
internet.  Then I seem to remember that Matcom became purely
commercial, then was bought by the MathWorks.  I think some bits of
their technology may have finally made it into MathWorks products.

In any case, it might not be too hard to convert syntax, but inferring
types to make the resulting code run fast is much harder.  And even
converting syntax can be tricky, since Octave allows things like the
following in a script file:

  function foo ()
     bar
  endfunction

  function bar ()
    printf ("foo-i-hithere\n");
  endfunction

so you'd need to parse everything before you could output anything
(otherwise, how would you know that bar is the function that's defined
later in the same file?).  Currently, Octave doesn't work that way, so
some major changes would be needed.

jwe



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