Computational Engineering w/Maxima



On 04/18/2013 02:33 PM, Michel Talon wrote:
> Przemek Klosowski wrote:
>> If you're looking for compatibility with existing software or coursework
>> based on Matlab, you definitely should consider Octave which has
>> compatibility as a design goal
>
> In my limited experience, scilab is much better than octave. At least when i
> looked at octave it was a *very* poor clone of matlab.

I think that if one took a random sample of .m files, Octave would be 
more successful in running them---but I haven't performed the experiment 
so I can't say that with certainty. In my experience of using both 
Matlab and Octave, Octave is quite a reasonable clone. When did your 
negative experience happen and what deficiencies caused it?

One area where people who previously used Matlab consistently complain 
about Octave is lack of graphical IDE, so Scilab wins some points there. 
Octave is currently in final stages of deploying an IDE, so in the 
future the scoring should be based on numerical performance and breadth 
of libraries, where Octave is going strong.