From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Feb 19 13:35:05 1998
Subject: Loading of Matlab 5 files
From: Steven N Harp <snh2 at psu dot edu>
To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 14:34:46 -0500 (EST)

I sent inadvertently sent the message to jwe only, If anyone on the
list has looked at this problem or has any new information I would
appreciate hearing about it.

Steve Harp

 

On 18-Feb-1998, Steven N Harp <snh2 at psu dot edu> wrote:

| Yesterday I tried to load some .mat files in octave and the load
| failed. After a little thought I remembered seeing some information a
| while back about a change in the mat format for Matlab version 5 and
| not being able to load this files into octave. I searched through the
| old postings and found out there the Mathworks has ( or had) some code 
| that could be used in developing programs to load Matlab 5
| files. However there was some discussion about the conflict of using
| the Mathworks code in octave and violation of the GPL. After that it
| appears the topic died.
| 
| Is there any method to load Matlab 5 mat file into octave-2.10 ?
| 
| If not has anyone looked into this problem?
| 
| If the specification for the file format is known and code was written 
| from scratch to read these files would that be an acceptable, under
| the GPL, solution.

I just noticed that you sent your message to help-octve-request, so it
was only sent to me.

If you want to send it to the list, please resend it to
help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu dot 

My answer for your question is that if the file format is published
somewhere, and someone writes freely available code to read it, then I
will consider including it with the normal Octave releases.
Otherwise, there's not much I can do.  We can't link proprietary code
with Octave.

jwe