Re: Compatability and an engineer's perspective

[Jacob Dawid]

Hello Jonathan,

> I've been watching Octave mature for some time now.  One concern that I have
> is the trend to move away from compatibility with MATLAB.  Allowing
> endfunction, endfor, etc... makes sense for making Octave a nicer language
> from a programmers point of view, but it does not help engineers grab pieces
> of Octave code and use them in MATLAB.  (Key for allowing a build up of
> confidence in the product)

This is my personal opinion, but actually GNU Octave does a really
good job supporting MATLAB as a subset of the Octave language, thus
caring for compatibility with MATLAB. If you want MATLAB tu support
Octave scripts, I guess you should ask The Math Works to support the
Octave language.

> I've adapted and can very quickly convert an Octave Toolbox to MATLAB, but
> having a good automatic converter would be much better.

You are free to write that or pay someone who will write it for you.

> I'm not trying to put Octave down at all.  I only want to make sure that
> everyone understands what this trend is leading to from an Engineer's
> perspective.  Right now I cannot recommend Octave as a replacement due to
> the differences in syntax, lack of handle graphics, no classdef, and no IDE.

GNU Octave is in constant development. For example, it will likely
come with an IDE in the next version, running on all major platforms.

> The other compatibility issue I see is that the choice of FLTK for your
> widget set.  If you are not aware, all of MATLAB's UI and GUI tools are
> based on JAVA AWT and SWING.  I'm afraid the choice of FLTK will limit your
> compatibility in the future.

We are moving away from FLTK to Qt, so it well integrates with the
rest of the IDE. Qt runs natively on all major platforms, since does
not need a JVM. This has not been done yet, but I suppose this to
happen soon, too. Other than that, the FLTK is only a "frame" for an
OpenGL window for rendering.

> Let me state it again, I am not downing Octave at all.  I just want the
> community to understand you are making it harder for American Engineers to
> switch to Octave.  (IMHO)
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
> Jonathan
>

Please understand that if you seek a replacement for MATLAB, you could
convince people to support GNU Octave financially instead of buying
MATLAB licenses. It is not that we lack the ideas, but we could make
good use of additional manpower in development or hardware. As long as
people expect a GNU Octave free as in free beer, we have to reduce
development to what's urgent.

Jacob