[sdiy] Octave for Windows

[Eric Brombaugh]

Aaron Lanterman wrote:
> Google on MATLAB and whatever topic you're interested in; with the 
> exception of the GUI features, nearly everything I've tried in Octave 
> has been straight MATLAB code that ran unmodified.

This is pretty much my experience as well. With the exception of 
plotting stuff which can be wildly divergent, the only real differences 
I've noticed are in some of the output options (printing, etc), string 
handling and some obscure matrix math defaults.

I've noticed that the Octave functions are pretty much compatible with 
the older Matlab toolboxes. Recently Matlab has been deprecating some of 
its functions though, so for example the 'remez()' function still works 
but when you look it up in the Matlab help they recommend you use 'firpm()'.

To the other question, I like Matlab because it has a nice GUI/IDE and 
it's pretty much a standard throughout the system engineering world. For 
personal projects though where I don't have much of an EDA tools budget 
Octave is an almost perfect substitute. If I code my routines with some 
care they're pretty much portable to either one.

Does anyone know if there's a definitive document describing the 
differences between the two? Most of what I know is just a kind of vague 
sense of "don't do that"...

Eric