Re: Scilab vs. Octave

[Brian Blais]

Arvid Rosén wrote:
> I have been using booth Scilab and Octave for quite some time now and 
> have some questions. For those of you not familiar with Scilab; it is 
> just another Matlab clone, providing basicly the same functionallity as 
> Octave.
>
> I am not very fond of Scilab as a project. Bugs are not corrected the 
> way they should and there is no active community as in the case of 
> Octave. 

In trying to find a numerical tool for teaching and research, I too checked out 
Scilab.  I have the same observation as you, and I also felt that some of the syntax 
of functions was needlessly obtuse (like timers, and getting keyboard input).  What 
won me over to Octave was the interfacing with C/C++.  In Scilab you have to have 
multiple files around for each function, and it is far from straightforward.


> However, Scilab do have some strong points, namely:
>
> 1) Object orientation in scripts.
> You can define new obejct types and overload functions operating on the 
> objects. This is great! Can this be done in Octave? Is it planned for 
> the future?

This I can't address.  Perhaps there is a way in Octave.  I recently missed this when 
I wanted to use some scilab code where I overloaded ">" for the logical "implies" 
operator.

> 2) Somewhat easy user-interface scripting.
> You can make scripts that bring up windows with sliders and buttons and 
> such. These scripts are platform independent which is very usefull.
> Is this easy to do using Octave? Can it be done?

although not native to octave, there are a number of projects (linux only, I believe) 
which use various toolkits for this.  I have one at http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais/octave

which uses fltk to do these sorts of gui things.  a google search on fltk and octave 
comes up with another one.


                                bb

--
-----------------

            address@hidden
            http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------