GNU Octave – Scientific Computing Open Source Tools ( MATLAB compatiable software)

By admin on July 22nd, 2008

History

The project was conceived around 1988. At first it was intended to be a companion to a chemical reactor design course. Real development was started by John W. Eaton in 1992. The first alpha release dates back to January 4, 1993 and on February 17, 1994 version 1.0 was released. Version 3.0 was released on December 21, 2007.

The name has nothing to do with musical octaves. Octave is the name of one of the early authors of Octave, a professor who was known for his ability to quickly come up with good approximations to numerical problems.

Download Details

You can download Ocatave from the following website
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html

Technical details

* Octave is written in C++ using STL libraries.
* Octave has an interpreter that interprets the Octave language.
* Octave itself is extensible using dynamically loadable modules.
* Octave interpreter works in tandem with gnuplot and Grace software to create plots, graphs, and charts, and to save or print them.

Octave, the language

The Octave language is an interpreted programming language. It is a structured programming language (an example of which is the C language) and supports many common C standard library constructs, and can be extended to support UNIX system calls and functions. However, it does not support passing arguments by reference.

Octave programs consist of a list of function calls or script. The language is matrix-based and provides various functions for matrix operations. It is not object-oriented, but supports data structures.

Its syntax is very similar to MATLAB, and carefully programming a script will allow it to run on both Octave and MATLAB.

Because Octave is made available under the GNU General Public License, it may be freely copied and used. The program runs under most Unix and Unix-like operating systems, as well as Microsoft Windows.

MATLAB compatibility

Octave has been built with MATLAB compatibility in mind. It therefore shares many features with MATLAB:

1. Matrices as fundamental data type.
2. Built-in support for complex numbers.
3. Powerful built-in math functions and extensive function libraries.
4. Extensibility in the form of user-defined functions.

(Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Octave)

Categorized under: Octave, Open Source Programming.
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No Responses to “GNU Octave – Scientific Computing Open Source Tools ( MATLAB compatiable software)”

  1. Jyoti Sharma says:
    May 27, 2009 at 1:38 pm

    This is described as it is in Wikipedia. Is it worthwhile to duplicate the information here? Search engines will identify duplication and ignore/blacklist this post.

    Regards

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