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rmax
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Joined: December 8th, 2005, 9:31 am

Matlab vs Octave

May 23rd, 2014, 9:49 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: katastrofaIf I had two fish in a tank, I would totally name them Scipy and Numpy now.I would name then lunch and dinner.
 
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ExSan
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Joined: April 12th, 2003, 10:40 am

Matlab vs Octave

May 23rd, 2014, 10:35 am

alternatives to matlab
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Cuchulainn
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Matlab vs Octave

May 23rd, 2014, 10:52 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: rmaxQuoteOriginally posted by: katastrofaIf I had two fish in a tank, I would totally name them Scipy and Numpy now.I would name then lunch and dinner.Wanda I and Wanda II?
 
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spradlig
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Joined: May 13th, 2014, 6:41 pm

Matlab vs Octave

June 1st, 2014, 12:51 am

Maosika:I have some feedback.A huge difference between Octave and Matlab is that it Octave does not come with a GUI that is easy to install and use unless you are a computer maven. There is a beta version. The GNU Octave people said ~6 months ago that they would release a new version with built-in GUI. I subscribed to a GNU e-mail list so I would hear about it when it happens. I'm waiting (today is May 31).Octave is more flexible than Matlab; for some things there are more and better ways to do them in Octave. That sounds like a good thing, but it can make it difficult to write Matlab-compatible code.There is a lot of documentation on Octave out there,; it just might be hard to find. If you Google Octave stuff, you'll find that random people have posted their own conflicting documentation, and much of it is out of date. There IS an official, definitive reference manual that you should find. I downloaded it once. It's harder to find than it should be.There's a good book by Quateroni (sp?) about scientific computing in Matlab and Octave. It is one of the very few books on scientific computing in Octave. I've tried freemat, but it doesn't seem to have a command to find the null space of a matrix. I search the entire official reference manual for the strings "null" and "null space", and I also did some Googling, and I came up empty. This is an extremely basic matrix operation. That's a dealbreaker for me, so I gave up on it. Too bad, since it has a built-in GUI and its syntax is very similar to Matlab.DomainMath IDE is a GUI for Octave that is not very popular but may be worth checking out. I've used it a little, but not enough to know if you can count on it 100%.Another difference between Matlab and Octave is that I'm pretty certain Octave cannot do symbolic math at all. I don't know how important this is in financial applications.Yet another difference is that there are hundreds or thousands of toolboxes that do extra things available for Matlab, and not many for Octave. I think that few of those toolboxes are free, and if you can't afford Matlab, you probably can't afford many of the toolboxes, either.Here's my advice:Avoid Matlab.Go to sourceforge.net and download GNU Octave. If you get it there, it comes with lots of extra packages that may be useful. It's probably a good idea to get a free account at sourceforge while you're at it. Don't worry, they won't spam you.Visit the GNU Octave Web page and scan their FAQ. If you like working at the command line, fine.If you want a GUI, sign up for the GNU e-mail list mentioned at the GNU Octave page. They should send an announcement when Octave comes out with a built-in GUI. Also, install DomainMath IDE. If you don't like it, or you have used Eclipse and you like it, there's something called OctEclipse that might be worth a shot. Greg