I've been playing with octave a bit (octave is essentially a free clone of
matlab), after not using Matlab for 15 years or more.
Why might it interesting to hook up to maxima?
1. Many people know and love Matlab (maybe Octave too). Its conventions,
while crummy from a technical programming language perspective -- bad scope
rules, no real packages, and a terrible convention that redefines an array A
as a function if there is a file named A.m in accessible directories --
making compilation very iffy...
yet it has fostered many applications: many people contributing useful
programs. Octave comes with (free) code tuned on a per-cpu basis. (e.g.
when I installed Octave, it knew I had a Pentium D and loaded appropriate
assembler). For some people it might be nice to know that someone who really
cares about Lapack, parallel Lapack, etc, is on the job, rather than hoping
the Fortran-to-Lisp stuff is working, and up to the latest revision, etc.
There are also packages for gnuplot as well as a java plotting program.
2. Its programming tool are sometimes neat and/or bizarre. To reverse a
vector V of n items, instead of doing
reverse(V), one does something like V([n:-1:1]). Things like this can be
added to Maxima, and maybe that should be revisited.
3. Maxima could provide the same utility for Octave as Maple does for
Matlab; this is, I think, of only slight interest to people who know how to
use Maxima. It could pique interest in CAS among of the (much larger, I
think) community of Octave users. Octave/Matlab is, (I think) rather widely
used in courses, and having a free symbolic toolkit for Octave would
introduce those students to a few features of a CAS.
4. What else could be done? Well it would be really neat if one could have
Octave++ where all the numerics were done in arbitrary precision. For now,
even the Lapack subset is probably not up for that, much less stuff like
numerical quadrature. Some of this could probably be taken from MPFR if
someone cared. (Any MPFR experts who read this mailing list?)
Now if we could get some Octave enthusiast to pick this up, instead of
diverting a Maxima expert, that would be even better.
RJF