From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Nov 21 00:16:10 2003
Subject: Re: restructuring load-save
From: JD Cole <listguy at transientresearch dot com>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
CC: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at jazz dot ncnr dot nist dot gov>,    octave-maintainers@bevo.che.wisc.edu
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 23:42:19 -0800


>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.
>  
>
Paul  and I were recently discussing this in two contexts: (1) as you 
state, a library which is somewhat separable from Octave to allow other 
applications to access Octave data, and (2) interprocess communication. 
Let me elaborate, I will use my distributed Octave work as an example.

    In order transport data between computational nodes, I use some of 
Octave's internal functions to convert octave types to a binary stream, 
send the stream, then convert back to Octave type(s). Other attempts at 
parallel octave implementation have taken a similar path. Such 
functionality, I imagine, is also useful for other applications such as 
the recent discussion about Octave front-ends. In these context's it is 
important that such load/save functionality be availble to both 
applications. This brought to mind two issues (1) licensing, such a 
library should probably fall under a LGPL type license and (2) such 
functionality should be, ideally, somewhat optimized to reduce the 
aggregation/de-aggregation times.

Any thoughts?

JD