From bug-octave-request at che dot utexas dot edu  Sat Nov  6 14:23:29 1993
Subject: desire to integrate other fortran packages into octave
From: ceb at netcom dot com (Buckley)
To: bug-octave at che dot utexas dot edu
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1993 12:24:11 -0800


I recently ran into octave, and of course found it to be a tool far
superior in design and concept to a growth-stunted and ill-conceived
one I wrote on demand last year, and have been using (and being abused
by) ever since.

But of course, octave as I have it (v.0.74) is very much a
work-in-progress, and doesn't have an interface to the netlib tools I
frequently use (LM portions of minpack and GLIM).  Supposing that it's
too much to hope for that these have been integrated in the mean time,
I am perfectly willing to integrate them myself (and return the results
to you).  I understand from the documentation that there are documents
that you can send which would provide guidelines on how to do this, so
I don't have to reverse engineer the whole thing.

Specifically, I would be interested in knowing what the API is like,
how to extract matrices and vectors, what your policy is for handling
these ubiquitous catch-all information and flag arrays, how to handle
the scratchpad storage that these things usually expect, etc.  In
short, I'm looking for the documentation I would write if I were in
your position and wanted to leverage my efforts by having people add
capabilities for me in an effective and reusable way, rather than
having to do it all myself.

For obvious reasons, I would be very interested to know if the dynamic
loading support evident in the directory hierarchy really works.

Also, I would signal that I can't get the plotting stuff to work as
advertised in the file PLOTTING - in particular, the test function
sombrero is undefined.  (And yes, gnuplot is correctly installed on my
system, and the variable containing the binary for gnuplot is properly
set.)  Is this also a half-finished feature?  If so, where is the
half that is finished?  I must admit, I don't understand the rationale
behind the way you have constructed your directory hierarchy.