[Maxima] octave, matlab, maxima

[Doug Stewart]

Richard Fateman wrote:
> I've been playing with octave a bit (octave is essentially a free clone of
> matlab), after not using Matlab for 15 years or more.
> Why might it interesting to hook up to maxima?
>
> 1. Many people know and love Matlab (maybe Octave too). Its conventions,
> while crummy from a technical programming language perspective -- bad scope
> rules, no real packages, and a terrible convention that redefines an array A
> as a function if there is a file named A.m in accessible directories --
> making compilation very iffy...
>
> yet it has fostered many applications: many people contributing useful
> programs. Octave comes with (free) code tuned on a per-cpu basis.  (e.g.
> when I installed Octave, it knew I had a Pentium D and loaded appropriate
> assembler). For some people it might be nice to know that someone who really
> cares about Lapack, parallel Lapack, etc, is on the job, rather than hoping
> the Fortran-to-Lisp stuff is working, and up to the latest revision, etc.
> There are also packages for gnuplot as well as a java plotting program.
>
> 2. Its programming tool are sometimes neat and/or bizarre.  To reverse a
> vector V of n items, instead of doing
> reverse(V),  one does something like V([n:-1:1]). Things like this can be
> added to Maxima, and maybe that should be revisited. 
>
> 3. Maxima could provide the same utility for Octave as Maple does for
> Matlab;  this is, I think, of only slight interest to people who know how to
> use Maxima. It could pique interest in CAS among of the (much larger, I
> think) community of Octave users.  Octave/Matlab is, (I think) rather widely
> used in courses, and having a free symbolic toolkit for Octave would
> introduce those students to a few features of a CAS. 
>
> 4. What else could be done?  Well it would be really neat if one could have
> Octave++  where all the numerics were done in arbitrary precision.  For now,
> even the Lapack subset is probably not up for that, much less stuff like
> numerical quadrature.  Some of this could probably be taken from MPFR if
> someone cared. (Any MPFR experts who read this mailing list?)
>
> Now if we could get some Octave enthusiast to pick this up, instead of
> diverting a Maxima expert, that would be even better.
>
> RJF
>
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>   
I wrote a very simplistic connection between Octave and Maxima
 code in octave to make a maxima input file
 run maxima -> write the answer to a file
 read maximas answer into octave
 convert it to octave and use it .

The big jobs are to write the parsers to convert between the two languages.

In the end I set it aside  and use Maxima for what maxima is good 
at(symbolic), and
Octave for what octave is good at(numeric).

Where does sage come into this discussion?