Debian Package a Day ([info]debaday) wrote,
@ 2004-06-16 08:00:00
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octave - The GNU Octave language for numerical computations
Octave is a (mostly Matlab® compatible) high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically.

Octave uses some of the best and most respected numerical libraries as balgen, dassl, eispack, fftpack, lapack, linpack, minpack, odepack, ranlib, slatec-fn and villad. Octave can be dynamically extended with user-supplied C++ files.


More information on the project web site. It's got a long list of package dependencies, but for the Matlab® fans in the crowd, it could be what you're looking for.

More information on this package can be found on the Debian web site.
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[info]andrel
2004-06-16 08:48 am UTC (link)
The package you want is octave-forge, which adds in a bunch of community contributed Matlab-4 compatibility functions. There is a nice emacs mode for interacting with Octave.

There are a few weak points: Octave implements the Matlab-4 language. That means only 1-D and 2-D arrays are available; the n-D arrays introduced in Matlab-5 are not part of octave. Function plotting is delegated to gnuplot. Quick-n-dirty visualisation is fine, but it is hard to get publication-quality plots out of Octave. (For that you need to directly work with Gnuplot or use GNU R). And Octave doesn't have the same GUI programming capabilities of Matlab.

Most of us can live with those limitations. I've found that Matlab code which doesn't exercise those features is very easy to port to Octave.

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