From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Mon Dec 16 12:31:28 2002
Subject: Re: ROctave
From: Andy Adler <adler at site dot uottawa dot ca>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
cc: Duncan Temple Lang <duncan at research dot bell-labs dot com>,    octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 13:31:04 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, John W. Eaton wrote:
>   octave_init ();  // perhaps with an argument to say not interactive?
>
>   // other stuff...
>
>   for (;;)
>     {
>        // ...
>
>        octave_value result = parse_and_execute_octave_command (???);
>
>        // or some other method of controlling Octave...
>     }
>
> Though I'm not sure what would be best.  As things are now,
> octave_value is probably only useful inside a C++ program, and it's
> not clear to me how we should control Octave from another program.  In
> some cases, parsing and evaluating strings might be OK, but in other
> cases, you may want to build a parse tree using some function calls
> and then evaluate that directly, skipping the lexer/parser.
>
> As a minimum, I think we need to write a few functions that allow us
> to initialize Octave without starting up the interactive I/O system so
> we can just use Octave as a compute engine.

This is exactly the functionality I need to write a proper
Inline::Octave for Perl. Currently I'm doing it by controlling
stdin / stdout with two pipes, but it's a real pain.

Note: this API also needs a good way to get errors and
warnings back from octave.

Andy