Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations

[Kjetil brinchmann Halvorsen]

see inline:

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Jake <address@hidden> wrote:
> Neither MATLAB or Octave are meant for general purpose; I agree with the
> general consensus and what Jordi said before that basically, "use the right
> tool for the right job". It looks like some people expect to be able to do
> everything through one language, and that just isn't practical.

Well, that might be true, in principle, but learning many dofferent
programming languages isn't
really practical, either! Especially not for non-programmers. Therefor
people tend to try to do everything in one language, and as a
parctical choice, that is very reasonable.

I for one have a tendency to mix languages, use more than one at the
same time, my work in each of them becomes less efficient!

Kjetil
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 10:48 AM, c. <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 21 Nov 2012, at 18:38, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
>>
>> > That is all true, but in many cases the data has to come from somewhere.
>> > When it comes from other applications, it comes in files in various
>> > formats, and that's when you start hating Jordi's #3 and 4 (and also #1
>> > and 9).
>>
>> Indeed, so just use some other tool for doing the conversion to and from
>> formats that Octave likes, rather than trying to use Octave's (limited)
>> data structures for tasks they are not meant to accomplish.
>> Think of Octave as  essentially being able to deal with arrays of numbers
>> and little more [*].
>>
>> > And as I said before, when some poor shmuck is handled a bunch of matlab
>> > 7.3 scripts that don't even run in 2011b and is told to run that from a
>> > web form, #0, 5, and 6 make sure that isn't doable.
>>
>> Possibly true, but my point was that, although he does have my sympathy,
>> Matlab does not market to that "poor shmuck" ...
>>
>> Matlab has become a de-facto standard by providing an environment where it
>> is easy to implement complex numerical algortihms without much knowledge
>> of
>> complex data structures. This ease of use did come at a cost but, on the
>> other
>> hand, it has facilitated the implementation of a huge amount of clever and
>> useful programs written by people who would not have taken the effort to
>> do
>> so in a different language.
>>
>> As I see it, Octave's purpose is to make available a similarly convenient
>> number
>> crunching environment to those users that are not willing to trade Freedom
>> for ease
>> of use, so it might deviate from Matlab's syntax now and then but I don't
>> think
>> it would make sense to try and tronsform it into a general purpose.
>>
>> c.
>>
>> P.S. On a side note, as you seem to like Python but have to deal with
>> other people's
>> code written in Octave, have you ever considered using Pytave
>> <https://launchpad.net/pytave> ?
>>
>>
>> [*] That is of course an over-simplification but if you keep low
>> expectations you sure will
>> never be disappointed ;)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Help-octave mailing list
>> address@hidden
>> https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/listinfo/help-octave
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Help-octave mailing list
> address@hidden
> https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/listinfo/help-octave
>



-- 
"If you want a picture of the future - imagine a boot stamping on the
human face - forever."

George Orwell (1984)