From help-octave-request  Wed Feb 17 15:07:06 1993
Subject: Re: Matlab compatibility 
From: John Eaton <jwe>
To: ameroni at dsmisp dot mi dot infn dot it (Alberto Meroni)
Cc: help-octave
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 93 15:07:01 CST

: Sorry to disturb the Net, is octave supposed, ar least in principle
: and in a far future compatible with matlab ?

Yes, though some Matlab `features' may not be available by default,
but can be switched on by changing the values of some global
variables.

For example, the variable `do_fortran_indexing' controls whether or
not to allow things like:

  a = [1,2;3,4];
  a(3)

By default, Octave gives an error message for this, since using a
single index is only really makes sense for vectors.  If you set the
value of `do_fortran_indexing' to `true', the commands above will
print `ans = 2'.

The major problem areas right now are:

  * Most Matlab string operations are not supported.
  * Assignment of [] to delete matrix elements doesn't work.
  * Plotting is lame.
  * The format of the files produced by the save command is completely
    different.
  * The division operators won't solve least-squares problems yet.
  * Recursive functions don't really work properly yet.
  * Some missing commands/functions.

There may be others that I can't remember just now.  If there are
missing features that you need, let me know.

jwe