Hi Claire, I use Maxima for the symbolic parts and them Octave for the numeric parts. I even wrote an Octave program to write out a script file for Maxima, then used the system calls to run maxima. and maxima wrote the answer to a file , that I then read into octave and used the answer directly in octave.
This could be expanded to work much like the symbolic package, or like Matlab use to do when they called Maple to do the symbolic parts. It would be like a parser that understood the Maxima syntax. The problem was that where to stop! So in the end I just use Maxima when I need it and Octave for all else.
Doug