Re: Octave and Guile?

[Jim Blandy]

> Would there be any interest within the Guile community for some sort
> of merger of Octave and Guile?

I think this would be superb --- a great benefit to both tools.

It sounds to me like Guile has accumulated a good core of hackers
around itself --- I used to be worried about it, but now I'm much more
confident.  The design gets cleaned up in little ways daily.  If the
Octave/Guile merger is done well, that can only make things better.

> Would a merger of Octave and Guile be better?
> 
> Perhaps merger is not the right word -- I'm not talking about merging
> numerical tools with the Guile core, but about replacing Octave's
> interpreter with Guile, and writing a translator for Octave's language
> into Guile.  As I imagine it, this would also mean that (nearly) all
> of Octave's numerical capabilities would be available directly from
> Guile code too.

Yes, exactly.

> Octave would also likely receive a facelift to remove bad features
> (Matlab compatibility would not be a significant goal) and to focus
> the language on numerical capabilities only.

If Matlab still has a significant user base, I suspect you may want to
keep Matlab compatibility.  Implementing Matlab as a Guile translator
seems like a natural solution.