Re: MSDOS-port of octave, where?

[Tom Short]

>> Can anybody point me to a location, where I can get a binary for MSDOS?
>> Don't advise me to change the OS, cause I run it fine under linux. My 
>
>Michael,
>
>If you are successful, kindly share the info.
>There is at least 51 other souls desperately
>in need of the MSDOS port of octave here.

If 51 souls are "desperate", you could do the port yourself with that pool
of human-power :-) It is tougher than it sounds based on the groups that
have tried it so far.

Over a year ago, there were two groups working on an MS-DOS port of octave,
and I haven't heard if either of them got something to work well:

(1) Klaus Gebhardt (address@hidden) referred to
a group in Stuttgart who was working on a port (e-mail unknown) based on
Klaus's emx port. 

Comments I received from Klaus:

"i did not test octave under DOS, because octave needs so much memory and such a
good CPU, that this computer can run OS/2. But some people in Stuttgart are
working on changing my port so that it runs under DOS. There main changes are
the pipes to Gnuplot and the pager, because i use popen to start the programs
and popen is not supported under DOS, i think. As far as i know the people in
Stuttgart are nearly ready. The info command is build in, so it should work.
I don't know, why readline fails to work. Perhaps you send me a detailed
description of the problems with readline and info, and also your config.sys
and autoexec.bat.

The problem with octave and DOS is that DOS is not a multitasking and
multisession system. So programs like Gnuplot or Ghostscript can't be started
in a second window, which allows you to see the graph and work on your next
input to octave."

(2) Also, Michel Juillard, CEPREMAP, Paris (address@hidden) was also
working on a DOS port and got it along as far as the following:

"I am performing a port to DOS, OS/2, using emx+gcc. After some 
initial difficulties, I made big progress replacing the info library 
with the OS2 port of gnuinfo of K.U. Rommel and the OS2 
implementation of readline in E. Mattes GDB.
I built a very simple pager inside Octave itself.
I need the thing to be working in DOS for our class labs, so I set 
aside the DLL for the time beeing, compiling a single monster of more 
than 2Mb of exe file.
I still have to implement the shell utilities and the piping to 
GNUPLOT. It would be easy in OS2 only, but for DOS compatibility, 
I need to build a temporary file and then execute GNUPLOT.
By the way, I'm still hesitant on when to trigger GNUPLOT. I guess 
that the easier would be to do it on replot only , but that gives a 
different meaning to this command."

- Tom