From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Thu Nov 20 23:17:51 2003
Subject: Re: restructuring load-save
From: pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net
To: octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 00:20:55 -0000

On 20 Nov 2003 at 10:45, John W. Eaton wrote:

> Alternatively, we change the octave-binary format to use HDF5
> internally.  We could still provide a library of HDF5 functions for
> Octave, perhaps even allowing the load/save functionality for the
> octave-binary file format to be written in the scripting langauge
> instead of C++.  The downside of this is that Octave would then depend
> on HDF5, so to have a fully functional copy of Octave, you would need
> to have HDF5 working on your system first, and I'm not sure we want to
> have the added dependency.

Some would argue that to have a fully functional copy of
Octave you need octave-forge and then some ;-)

So long as octave defaults to reading and writing ascii
format when HDF5 is not available, then the dependency
on HDF5 is weak.

> Finally, it would be nice to provide a separate library for reading
> and writing the mat5 and octave-binary file types that could be used
> outside of Octave.

Yes, that request has come up on the list more than once.

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle at users dot sf dot net