From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Fri May 15 04:16:41 1998
Subject: Re: text command in octave ?? 
From: "PETER HOPFGARTNER"<phopfgartner at memc dot inet dot it>
To: <help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Fri, 15 May 98 11:06:48 +0100


     I've got the impression that the numerical topics covered freely 
     avaiable don't have that momentum that the kernel development has 
     mostly because it is too spreaded. You have (at least as long as the 
     HURD has that stability and driver support that the Linux kernel has) 
     ONE kernel to work on, ONE compiler kit (if you consider egcs an 
     prototype for GCC 3), ONE glib etc. But you have more then one member 
     of the Matlab-like family (Octave SURELY the best (biased opinion), 
     Scilab, Euler, etc). You have the calculation libraries SPREAD over 
     liboctave, which is mostly a wrapper for extremly well tested Fortran 
     routines, a lot of useful routines in gnussl (linear algebra), a lot 
     in gsl (random numbers, fft, annealing), in plotutils (splines, ode). 
     That leaves me confused. PDE is appraoched from a technog, KFEM etc. 
     Plotting is done by GNUPLOT, PLOTUTILS, PLPLOT and more.
     
     I think, that contributions come when a project starts to have that 
     mixture of importance, sex-appeal, visions and most of all 
     syncronization, like the Linux kernel has, like the gnome project has 
     etc.
     
     Could it be that this could be done starting project in the spirit of 
     the IMSL, based obviously on C++, basing Octave and all the plotting, 
     statistics etc. on it. I think that this could gain the attention from 
     the numerical hacker community.
     
                                                        Peter


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: text command in octave ?? 
Author:  <help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu > at NOVARALINK
Date:    5/15/98 1:36 AM


(...)
Consider writing one and contributing it!
     
| REMARK: Octave is a GREAT and USEFUL program.
     
Thanks.  I think it would be more useful if more people would 
contribute more.  If only a small fraction of the people interested in 
hacking on the Linux kernel were instead interested in working on 
improving Octave, it might have a lot more features.
     
     (...)