Re: is octave slow and missing functions?

[Matthias Brennwald]

On 13.08.2007, at 16:54, address@hidden wrote:

> Message: 10
> Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:53:53 +0200 (CEST)
> From: address@hidden (Karl Hammar)
> Subject: is octave slow and missing functions?
> To: address@hidden
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain
>
> I got this response re. octave as alternative to matlab:
>
> > I should make a note about this; I use octave a lot at home as  
> > it's rather
> > cheap (free). It can be an alternative in some instances but there  
> > are
> > some limitations with it:
> >
> > * most importantly, the plotting system has plenty of caveats.  
> > legends
> > does not work properly, line annotation is poor, zooming panning  
> > etc is
> > missing. it is totally useless for 3D plots (workarounds exist but  
> > they
> > are rather messy IMO)

That's somewhere in between very harsh criticism and simply not true.  
The plotting system is being improved every day.
Legends DO work, zooming DOES work, and 3D-plots DO work. And these  
things have been working very well for a long time now. I believe all  
these things worked fine with version 2.1.7x, which can be considered  
rather dated by now.

> > * it runs very poorly in windows using unix emulation libraries

I can't comment on this, but I've seen Octave running on Windows very  
nicely.
(Did I just use 'Windows' and 'nice' in the same sentence?)

> > * on mac, it relies on fink and macports. this installation has a few
> > problems, at least on my computer.

Not true. Look at Octave.app at sourceforge. Just a vanilla Mac  
application, no Fink and MacPorts required.

> > it is not really possible to use
> > alt+tab with it since it is an X11 application.

Not true. Octave runs in any terminal, not only in the X11 terminal.  
X11 can be used for plotting, but one can also use Aquaterm to plot  
in the native Mac environment (Aqua).

> > * there is no GUI (and the CLI lacks the very useful !-command)

Is this really a disadvantage? I hate GUIs that get in my way...
(back in the days when I used Matlab for my work, I ran Matlab on the  
command line terminal, without the GUI)

> > * it's rather slow compared to matlab

Uhm, no. Maybe some things are slower than in Matlab if the  
respective libraries were missing when Octave was compiled. If you  
use a properly compiled binary (e.g. the ones from the Octave  
download repository at sourceforge) your're fine.

> > * many more advanced commands are missing (convolution only works  
> > with
> > some cases for example)

Uhm, I don't think that convolution is any different in Octave than  
in Matlab. If I'm wrong I'd be grateful if someone could enlighten me  
with an example t

> > other than that I think it's rather ok. but I think it is only an
> > alternative on Linux/BSD where it came from.

Well, I switched over to Octave from Matlab. The only thing I miss is  
the advanced plotting system of Matlab, but Octave is getting there!

And: did you ever have trouble to make something work in Matlab? Did  
you send an email to Mathworks, asking for help? Propably not. If  
even if you had, you propably would not get an answer fro them.  
That's a little different with Octave and this help list!

Matthias


-------
Matthias Brennwald
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CH 8037 Zürich
+41 (0)44 364 17 03
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