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A few (Octave) ideas
From: |
Jake |
Subject: |
A few (Octave) ideas |
Date: |
Thu, 3 Jun 2010 14:33:15 -0400 |
Hello
all,
I just
finished a numerical methods class at OSU and noticed that Octave has
implementations of all of the MATLAB functions shown in the textbook (Numerical
Methods, 2nd edition by Amos Gilat) except for MATLAB's ODE solvers: ode23,
ode45, ode113, ode15s, ode23s, ode23t, and ode23tb. It also lacks the
odeset function that these solvers rely on. See http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/ode23.html.
Before you get any
ideas, I am only interested in helping and endorsing Octave, NOT
screaming "Why doesn't Octave have MATLAB's ____???"
I'm aware of the
OdePkg package on Octave-Forge, but this only implements three of the
previously mentioned functions, ode23, ode45, and odeset. I'm also aware
of Octave's built-in function, lsode. These are all great functions, but
I'm very interested in endorsing Octave over MATLAB in academia and as
such, it's important that Octave has implementations of most of MATLAB's core
functions.
Most of my
programming experience is with C, but I'm fluent enough in MATLAB/Octave that
I'd like to take a shot at implementing these functions. I'd hope
that they'd be improved by the community and be included in Octave
someday.
Naturally, I've got
a couple of questions:
1. Is there a
reason why these functions haven't already been implemented? Lack of
information on the algorithms, perhaps?
2. Is the
maintainer of OdePkg (Thomas Treichl) already working on implementing these
functions? I'd like to help, if possible.
3. Are there
any reasons why I shouldn't try to implement these
functions?
I've also got
another idea concerning packages. I was reading through the Octave manual
the other day and saw the various difference pkg functions and urlwrite.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, I think it'd be very useful and very easy to
implement an extra pkg option to automatically download and install Octave-Forge
packages. We could keep a small text file on one of the Octave sites
containing package names along with their dependencies and download URLs.
The new function would download this file, parse it, and then do nothing more
than download packages with urlwrite and install them with pkg install (as well
as ensuring that dependent packages are installed first). It'd be awesome
if you could take a fresh install of Octave and simply type in something like
'pkg get vrml'. I'd LOVE to program this much at least and would like to
hear what all of your thoughts are on such an idea.
Thanks for your
time.
-Jacob
Abel