From help-octave-request at che dot utexas dot edu  Tue Feb  8 03:02:07 1994
Subject: Re: 2 little questions 
From: John Eaton <jwe at che dot utexas dot edu>
To: help-octave at che dot utexas dot edu
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 94 03:02:06 CST

npettiau at ulb dot ac dot be (Pettiaux Nicolas) wrote:

: 2 in the manual that I printed, I did not found references on users defined
: functions IN FILES, as ".m" files are in Matlab. Are they implemented ?

Yes, they work more or less like Matlab .m files.  There will be more
information about function and script files in the next version of the
manual.

: What is the functional compatibility with Matlab in general ? (functions...)

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking here, but I'll take a stab at
answering anyway.  :-)

Octave is compatible with Matlab in many ways, but my intent is to
produce a useful system for doing numerical computations, not to
develop an exact clone of Matlab.

Since there are lots of engineers who know Matlab, I decided to use a
language that is reasonably compatible so that new users of Octave
would not have to learn a completely new language.  I am not concerned
about copying each and every Matlab feature, but I want to make it
easy for Matlab users to get started using Octave.

(That said, if you do find incompatibilities, please report them as
bugs to bug-octave at che dot utexas dot edu anyway as it may be something that
we would like to fix.)

I hope that Octave will eventually be better than Matlab, but that
will probably only happen if people decide to use Octave and
contribute to its development.  Octave depends on its users to improve
it by contributing new functions.  If the most talented people decide
to write code for Octave and make their work freely available, I
believe that Octave will improve rapidly.  If instead they decide to
write toolboxes for the MathWorks to sell...

I think that in some areas Octave is already better than Matlab.  For
example, Octave can handle DAE's and stiff ODE's with built-in
integrators.  I also think Octave's command-line interface is better,
because it offers things like command and variable name completion,
and the ability to enter functions directly on the command line.

Of course there are also lots of things that Matlab can do that have
not yet been done in Octave.  For example, none of the version 4.x
graphics functions are available.  I hope that Octave will eventually
have better plotting capabilities, but I doubt that we will copy the
Matlab 4.x features directly.

jwe