is octave slow and missing functions?

[Karl Hammar]

I got this response re. octave as alternative to matlab:

> I should make a note about this; I use octave a lot at home as it's rather
> cheap (free). It can be an alternative in some instances but there are
> some limitations with it:
> 
> * most importantly, the plotting system has plenty of caveats. legends
> does not work properly, line annotation is poor, zooming panning etc is
> missing. it is totally useless for 3D plots (workarounds exist but they
> are rather messy IMO)
> 
> * it runs very poorly in windows using unix emulation libraries
> 
> * on mac, it relies on fink and macports. this installation has a few
> problems, at least on my computer. it is not really possible to use
> alt+tab with it since it is an X11 application.
> 
> * there is no GUI (and the CLI lacks the very useful !-command)
> 
> * it's rather slow compared to matlab
> 
> * many more advanced commands are missing (convolution only works with
> some cases for example)
> 
> other than that I think it's rather ok. but I think it is only an
> alternative on Linux/BSD where it came from.

I don't have a Matlab license, nor MS-Windows, nor Mac so I cannot answer
that parts. But the last two points troubles me. Are they true?

/Regards
Karl