Re: Roadmap to 3.8.N

[Israel Herraiz]

Excerpts from Daniel Carrera's message of Thu Nov 08 19:37:17 +0100 2012:
> Interesting. I'm curious, can you give me an example of a difference
> between Octave-UPM and plain Octave that makes it more compatible with
> MATLAB?

What I meant is that I use Octave options that makes it (Octave) more
compatible with MATLAB (--traditional). Also, there are some settings
in Octave UPM to treat broadcasting as errors (see
http://mat.caminos.upm.es/octave/compatibilidad.html for more
details), and to turn on Octave warnings about MATLAB compatibility
(but I don't usually recommend to turn that on, it will make all
internal Octave code to launch warnings).

The editor uses MATLAB syntax highlighting, rather than Octave.

Saving and loading workspaces use MAT (Matlab v6) format, so you can
share workspaces with MATLAB (both ways).

But keep in mind that it is Octave :). I have tried to tweak it to
remove as many differences as possible with MATLAB, so my students can
easily switch to Octave.

> So far I have only found one incompatibility with MATLAB: When they read a
> text data file, Octave reads a column of zeros which MATLAB doesn't. In any
> case, I am not very concerned about compatibility. We only use MATLAB for
> simple exercises for which the languages are extremely compatible.

Do you have a code snippet for that? I am interested in all possible
incompatibilities, because the course I teach is shared between four
or five lectures, and most of the lecturers use MATLAB.

> Does your package have a GUI already? Is it taken from the development
> branch?

Yes. It is taken from Octave code, but it contains some
customizations (among them, a visual debugger that allows to change
workspaces between all the called user functions). The source code is
released under GPLv3. There is a SVN repository here:
https://forja.rediris.es/projects/octaveupm/

I specifically target Windows users, and I have done some changes to
the terminal in Windows, to make it more friendly (if it does not have
the focus, the cursor is red; it switches to blue if the terminal has
the focus). Actually, I have fixed some issues in the terminal lately,
but I have not released yet the next version (R7) with those
changes. But if you want to test, current version (R6) is fine, in
spite of the issues. I will release R7 soon.

> English would be fine. Swedish students can read English (in fact, this
> course is taught in English).

Cool. In any case, the installer is still in Spanish (although it is
pretty straightforward, just press "Siguiente"). I will try to make
the installer in English for R7.

Cheers,
Israel