Syncope: new object-oriented control package

[Lukas Reichlin]

Dear Octave Community

I'm an engineering student and I participate in Octave's Control  
Package development in my free time. The basics of that package were  
written by an American professor in the first half of the nineties and  
are not compatible with Matlab's Control Systems Toolbox. They have  
several inherent problems, mainly because they are not object-oriented  
(e. g. you can't write sys3 = sys2 * sys1 for a series connection).

In order to overcome these drawbacks, I started development of a new  
control package. It's completely object-oriented and as Matlab- 
compatible as possible. What makes it unique is its "model abstraction  
layer", i. e. commands like append, connect, feedback, series,  
parallel, horzcat, vertcat, subsref,+, -, * and so on are written  
model-independently. They all rely on just three (!) basic commands  
for model manipulation which need to be implemented in ss, tf or zpk.

At the moment, my package contains the basics for the handling of  
state-space and transfer function objects. Before I continue with zero/ 
pole/gain models and start porting higher-level user functions like  
"bode" or "step", I'd like to get some feedback in order to hammer out  
the basics. Therefore, I wish to publish my work as an "extra package"  
on the octave-forge server (under GPL 3, what else? :-). Luca  
Favatella (slackydeb), maintainer of the "old" control package, agreed  
to be the "new" package's maintainer. Could someone please create an  
empty package with the name "control-oo", "control-rewrite" or similar  
on the server?

AFAIK, Syncope (short for "SYstems aNd COntrol PackagE" and a pun on  
"Octave") is one of the first octave-forge packages to use object- 
oriented programming, and comments/feedback/advice would be highly  
appreciated. I hope that Syncope can supersede the "old" OCST in the  
long term.

http://n.ethz.ch/student/lukasre/download/syncope/

Cheers,
Lukas Reichlin

BTW: My octave-forge user name is "paramaniac"