From maintainers-request at octave dot org Mon Jan 30 11:21:00 2006
Subject: Re: "light-weight" build of Octave for Nokia 770
From: "Frederick (Rick) A Niles" <fniles at mitre dot org>
To: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
Cc: maintainers at octave dot org
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 10:12:56 -0600

Yeah, doesn't seem worth it.  I rather use a whole different program
that uses Matlab/octave syntax, but is < 2MB.   Just for simple
multiple, divided and some trig.

I guess I should just find a good scientific calculator program.

Rick.


On Sat, 2006-01-28 at 10:42 -0500, Paul Kienzle wrote:
> While a slim Octave would be nice, it would require
> a significant restructuring of the octave codebase.
> 
> There are some easy things to do such as splitting up
> liboctave so that e.g., if you do not want to supply the fft
> function in your slim octave you can simply leave out the
> fft.oct file.
> 
> The harder task is dropping some of the octave types.
> Currently individual functions which work on multiple
> types (e.g., sort) have a dispatch in the function itself
> to decide which type it is working with.  These would have
> to be moved to use a type-based dispatcher which calls
> a different function specialized for each type.
> 
> The octave base class would need to be restructured so that
> it has no particular knowledge of the various types, which
> means methods like int8_array_value can't be part of the
> base class.  Similarly for load/save.
> 
> Not impossible, but I don't imagine anyone is going to
> invest the time to do this.
> 
> - Paul
> 
> On Jan 27, 2006, at 7:46 PM, Frederick (Rick) A Niles wrote:
> 
> > I got a Nokia 770 about a week ago and I'm really digging it.  It runs
> > Linux and got all sorts of extra goodies like xterm, ssh, vpnc other 
> > fun
> > stuff.
> >
> > Anyway, I'd love to put Octave on it as sort of a super-nerd 
> > calculator.
> > The only thing that scares me off is the size of Octave.   Has anyone
> > done any work on a reduced octave that might not have all the
> > features?
> >
> > Just the RPM for octave weights in at 20MB and that doesn't include all
> > the dependences. Just liboctinterp.so is 8MB! Anyone out there try for
> > an octave-lite?  Is this a silly idea?
> >
> > -----
> > BTW, two other things while I've got your attention:
> >
> > (1) "octave.org" doesn't resolve to "www.octave.org". Me thinks this
> > should be fixed.
> >
> > (2) It seems, I never finished implementing dotted and dashed lines in
> > __pltopt1__.m  However, I tried looking at it after 10 years and I
> > couldn't quickly figure out the gnuplot syntax.  Anyone else interested
> > in making it work?  You can look at the code, but basically:
> >   "--" would be dashed lines
> >   "-." would be dash-dot lines
> >   "-:" would be dotted lines.
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Rick Niles.
> >
>