Re: Emacs mode for Matlab vs Emacs mode for Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On  7-May-2007, Quentin Spencer wrote:

| I've been using the Matlab mode for a long time because it's far more 
| extensive than the Octave mode. I assume that the two were developed 
| independently and that the Matlab mode is better developed because the 
| maintainer of the Octave mode is busy improving the rest of octave :). 
| There are a few things missing from the Matlab mode, like support for # 
| comments. I think the best way to improve the Octave mode at this point 
| is to take the Matlab mode and add the features like this that are missing.

OK, I see two separate issues here.  The first is that the Octave
sources include the files

  octave-hlp.el
  octave-inf.el
  octave-mod.el

and slightly modified copies of these files are also included with
Emacs.  So maybe we should remove the files from the Octave sources
since they are not useful without Emacs, and anyone who installs Emacs
will already have them.

The second is whether the Octave mode that Kurt Hornik (mostly) and I
(a little) wrote more than ten years ago is still the best thing to
use for editing Octave code.  I don't know what is best, but if people
think that the Matlab mode is better, then maybe those who are
interested should try to get that accepted as part of Emacs (though
you might have some trouble since adding "matlab mode" to Emacs would
probably be seen by RMS as "promoting non-free software".  Or, you
could work to improve the existing Octave mode that is part of Emacs.

Also, in response to Jordi's question:

  My questions are, is the relative austerity of
  the Octave mode as compared to Matlab mode intentional?

No, Kurt and I didn't intentionally try to write lame software.  I
think we tried to make it do the things that we cared about at the
time, and it was a lot better than what we had before (i.e., nothing).

jwe