Re: Octave 3.0

[Paul Kienzle]

On Apr 1, 2005, at 2:26 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> It's been more than two years (!) since I posted the following list of
> goals for the mythical Octave 3.0
>
> ...
> Comments?

One possible 3.0 goal that was mentioned was a stable API that would
not require a recompile of conforming oct-files whenever octave changed.

Currently octave has API version numbers, presumably tagged to changes
in octave_value.  If instead octave_value could be treated as an opaque
pointer with functions to access its methods and instance data this
would provide even more stability.  Tcl uses a jump table to avoid
binding to a particular library version.

Many oct-files only need minimal access to octave internals.  Functions
for checking type and dimension, for accessing array pointers and for
allocating returned arrays covers most operations.  Calling back
into octave is also common.

This could be put off until after the 3.0 release and still be valuable.

- Paul