Porting Control Systems Toolbox from Octave to R

[Jason Rupert]

To Whom It May Concern,

I've primarily been working with the R Project for Statistical Computing 
(http://www.r-project.org/), which I guess is a sister OpenSource mathematical 
project.  

I've really enjoyed working with the R Language, but I've also really enjoyed 
working with the Control Systems Toolbox within Octave.  Thus, I would like to 
investigate the possibility of porting the Control System Toolbox (CST) from 
Octave to R.  

After reviewing the Copyright information within the CST package it appears to 
be GPL 2, so I believe porting should be okay.  

I guess I wanted to coordinate with any of the the primary stakeholders in the 
CST to check on a few items:
(a) is there any interest to help with the port from Octave to R, 
(b) has any effort already started in the area of porting it from Octave to R, 
and
(c) are there any primary concerns about porting the capability from Octave to 
R.

I've
been in communication with a gentleman who ported some of the signal
capability from Octave to R, so I'm hoping to leverage some of his
lessons learned.  Also, I'm not sure the initial versions of the port
will be able to include all the functionality of the package, but I
hope at a minimum the initial release will include the bode function
for simple 2nd order systems.  

Again, I really appreciate all
the effort you put into producing the CST and Octave, so I would want to assure
credit is still given to the developers of CST as the initial and primary 
developers of
the R CST and my involvement was simply to port it to R.  I would also
want to assure that the quality of the results are also maintained, so
I would plan to do some check outs and regression tests.  

Any feedback from you on these topics is greatly appreciated.    

Sincerely, 
Jason Rupert

address@hidden

P.S. I attempted to send a direct email to the email addresses listed in the 
CST documentation, but the majority of those email accounts bounced.  I figured 
that it would be good protocol to post these thoughts to the Octave forum prior 
to proceeding, so thank you for entertaining these topics.