From help-octave-request at che dot utexas dot edu  Sun Jul 17 00:48:41 1994
Subject: Re: add me to list; general comments; dld? 
From: John Eaton <jwe at che dot utexas dot edu>
To: HORNE at CMOD2 dot PFC dot MIT dot EDU
cc: help-octave at che dot utexas dot edu
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 1994 00:48:24 -0500

HORNE at CMOD2 dot PFC dot MIT dot EDU wrote:

: 3) The single most useful function any system like octave can have, 
:    is dynamic loading of user compiled fortran or C functions.

:    I see notes in the documentation refering to DLD, but my
:    impression is that the idea is to make all (or at least very many)
:    modules loadable, and that this is still a distant hope.  A more
:    modest goal which will add a huge amount of functionality is
:    described below. 

I have been working on dynamic linking of externally compiled
functions.  The next release should support this, at least for systems
that have a port of dld.  It should be possible to make it work on
other systems too, either by porting dld, or by replacing a few
functions.

An interface to C++ functions will be defined.  From there, it should
be easy to call functions written in other languages.  I'll probably
provide examples of how to do it for C and Fortran on most Unix
systems.

: 5) Is anybody working on a VMS version of octave?  I don't know how
: competent I would be to assist, but I'd certainly be interested.

I don't plan on doing this myself, and I don't know of anyone who is
working on it.  If someone else does the work and the changes are
relatively clean, I'd be happy to merge them in with the master
sources.

Thanks,

jwe