Hello Guys,i use to make some stuff on matlab and at school they only have Scilab. I was wondering what was the main differences between the two, except the price. If we consider performance, simplicity and toolboxes available which one is the winner ?

Ludo,you might also want to consider Octave, which is another Free Matlab Competitor.I have only sporadically used Octave, and I haven't used Scilab, but I know a few who do. In general, to me, Octave seems like it has a larger following than Scilab, and more toolboxes. But both pale in comparison to Matlab as far as breadth of quality tool boxes.As far as performance, for simple matrix operations, they all use ATLAS, FFTW, etc. It seems to me that Octave used to be considered faster than ML (don't know about SL) but in the latest version, Matlab has added a JIT compiler that has help quite a bit--so it may well be faster now.At the end of the day, I think it critically depends on how much of your code you plan on writing yourself. If you don't mind writing quite alot of code, by all means, go with Octave or Scilab. But if you need something that has many routines built-in and available, go with Matlab. I'm an academic so I get a discount on Matlab--so its a very easy choice. But in general, figure out what you want to do and whether its already available on the three platforms--then balance the cost of the platforms vs. the time it will take you to develop what you need.HTH,matt.PS: There are also many who swear by SciPy as a replacement for Matlab, too. Its the Python scripting language with a large set of numerical and scientific functions.

Does anyone know whee I can get a discount for Matlab in the UK?

player,I'd check at www.mathworks.com for student versions (I know that in the US you can get it from the website, don't know about UK) If you are faculty, you only get the discount if your institution has a 'deal' with TMW, so you'll need to check w/ your campus software dept.HTH,matt.

Cheers...came to £50 student version.....I guess students must be rich......

BTW which one is easier to use/learn.....out of Scilab and Matlab??