I used matlab for a while just to find out that matlab/simulink integration does not
allow enough flexibility for some engineering applications I am interested it. Then,
I wrote a short interpreter to deal with it just to get in situation to be more of a
programmer than engineer so I looked at other alternatives like lua, cint, python,
octave, itd and decided that octave has most of the features that I need including
similarity with matlab. Although it was not designed with GUI in mind it can be
integrated with any GUI framework very easily with some minor issues and
without modifying or even recompiling octave or using pipes or networking.
Adding a QT GUI front end took me about an afternoon. I liked this fact very
much. The main problem I have is that octave console commands do not behave
the same as when they are called when linking to octave libraries. For example,
whos and pkg commands return data very hard to interpret if at all. Before I dive
into octave source code, I would appreciate if anybody would share their
experience with similar approaches. I can intercept the return values and
reformat them but I do not even know what some commands are returning. If I
find an acceptable solution to these issues, I will commit significant time to
integrating my project with octave and in the process develop a general,
matlab like, interface to octave and try to formulate a generic framework for a
simulink like but more flexible interface.
Anybody with any experience or interest in working together feel free to send
me either e-mail or respond to this forum. Pointers to any relevant documentation
would also be greatly appreciated.
