From bug-octave-request  Tue Nov 24 10:17:44 1992
Subject: Re: octave 
From: Tony Mullins <jamull>
To: sc
Cc: bug-octave
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 92 10:17:40 CST


: 
: Is it possible to obtain on-line or off-line documentation on Octave?
: Interested in curve-fitting.
: 
: Thanks.
: 
: Sulagna Chatterjee_________________________________________________
: Department of Chemical Engineering     :sc at che dot utexas dot edu 
: University of Texas  at  Austin, TX 78712 :chcu327@bongo.cc.utexas.edu 
: ____________________________________________________________________
: 

Sulagna,

Since JWE is not in I'll provide a partial answer.  He can fill you in
with perhaps more details when he arrives.  Unfortunately, there is
not as much documentation as is probably desired.  However,
fortunately, the user interface mimics Matlab and almost any command
documented in the Matlab documentation is implemented in Octave.  The
implementation details are probably not too important to the user.

For general overview of the project's purpose, see the files in

~jwe/src/octave/Notes

They are unprotected, so I assume JWE doesn't mind if you read them.
If you know the name of a command (or even if you don't) you can type

'help <command name>'

at the octave prompt and get a summary of the proper syntax for the
command.  Most of the commands have obvious names like 'cos', 'sin'
and even 'svd'.  If the command is not implemented you will get a
message to that effect.  The simple command 'help' to get a listing of
recognized commands is, as yet, not fully implemented and you will get a
message to that effect if you try it.  However, you can peruse the
files

~jwe/src/octave/src/builtin-fcns.cc
/usr/local/octave/lib/{*.m}

to get listing of the builtin functions and the m-file implementations
(functions implemented in the Octave command language), respectively.

Other than the Matlab documentation (which doesn't document the
extremely useful optimization and other non-Matlab commands available
in Octave), the help available on individual commands and the source
code I know of no other documentation available on Octave usage.

Perhaps JWE would like to do some shameless advertising on che-forum
a simple description and some tutorial examples. :>)


Hope this helps you get started.

Tony Mullins