From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Wed Dec  2 23:31:29 1998
Subject: OCTAVE: Matlab v5 Compat.
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Darren Farmer <farmer at cwr dot uwa dot edu dot au>
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1998 23:29:59 -0600 (CST)

On  3-Dec-1998, Darren Farmer <farmer at cwr dot uwa dot edu dot au> wrote:

| I am interested to gauge how compatible octave is with the current 
| version of Matlab (v5) or implementations that look to maintain 
| compatibility (if any).  The on-line info implies quite significant 
| compatibility with v4.

Why not just try it and see if it has the features you need?

| One area that I am really keen on is the ability to 
| use 'load' on ASCII files with comments embedded (lines begin % - as for 
| Matlab v5 BUT NOT in v4)

That should work in the next minor release (2.0.14).

|  and ability to load matlab v5 *.mat files.

This doesn't work and isn't likely to any time soon because as far as
I know, the format is proprietary and has not been published anywhere.
If there were free code available to read Matlab version 5 files, or
if the details of the file format were published somewhere, Octave
could probably support most of the file format, just as it currently
does for the older version 4 file format.  Perhaps you should complain
the the MathWorks for having proprietary data file formats.

jwe