From octave-graphics-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Fri Dec  1 09:50:16 2000
Subject: Proposal
From: Luis Alejandro Marquez Martinez <lmarquez at cicese dot mx>
To: octave-graphics at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 17:49:25 +0200

Hi!

I have been  testing the developement version of Octave (2.1.31).   I am

interested in using this at my research center as a teaching tool.

My interest area is control theory,  and altough a lot of fine work has
been
done  Dr. A. Scottedward Hodel and his students (congratulations!) still

are missing two important parts:

   -  A hybrid  (discrete/continuous) solver
   -  A GUI like SIMULINK, for constructing the models the easy way

With respect to the hybrid solver,   have you considered including such
a feature?

With respect to the SIMULINK-like interface,  still is an interesting
question to chose the right tools.  I have been looking several options
like  wxWindows (cross-platform,  free)
 Piper (http://bioinformatics.org/piper/documentation/index.html
              looks interesting, but still in alpha stage)
and GTK/VTK,   but I cannot decide myself for any of those.

I will have some free time this holidays,  I and found extremely
interesting as project,  and I would like to work on it.  The only
point is that I would do  this in Delphi.   The advantages of this are

- (#1) It is the only language that I know well enough to do this job
efficiently
- for a work of such complexity,  profesional tools are required,
specially
   if there is only a limited time for doing it.
- it is OO.
- linux port expected to be available very soon ( Kylix )

The obvious disadvantages are that, even if the code can be released
under the GNU,  is someone wants to modify it,  he/she will need a
copy of kylix or delphi for that,  and that this is subject to having
Borland
keeping the promise of cross-platform compiling.

So what I can propose is to start the development of this considering
it as a prototype.    Since Delphi is an OOP language,  this allows to
advance with the definition of classes, methods, algorithms
(e.g. to generate code from a scheme) and so on.    Once this work
be mature enough,  I think it  will be easier to find someone willing
to port it to a language where a free compiler will be available.
In the mean time,  this interface would be useful for end-users,
who actually don't care about the language or compilers needed,
as long as they can install it freely (and legally!) in their computers.

Best regards

Luis Alejandro Marquez -Martinez