Re: How does Octave shine?

[Bill Denney]

Johan Kullstam wrote:
> Alexander Barth <address@hidden> writes:
>   
> > With octave, I am sure that the code that I write today can still be
> > used in, say, 10 years. Not all institution use matlab, some maybe
> > use IDL or something else. It is not uncommon for scientists to
> > change institution and they are expected to bring their expertise
> > (including code) to the new institution.
> >     
> This is *not* true.  Octave recently got rid of the gnuplot functions
> and forced usage of the matlab graphics functions.  Also, the dot-oct
> details change too.  There used to be only two kinds of matrix,
> real and complex, now there are sparse and others.
>   
This *is* true.  The reason is that you can always download octave 2.1.* 
and you can download the requisite dependencies from various sources, 
and you can then compile it yourself for all time.  Now, that doesn't 
mean that new features will not be added.  Yes, there are new 
matlab-like graphics functions, but you can get the old plotting 
functions from an old version of octave and continue to use them (I'm 
pretty sure that they are almost all, if not all, .m files).

Bill