Octave workshop for Octave 3.0.0 on windows Xp

[Moritz Borgmann]

>It seems that many people are disappointed in some way because Octave
>doesn't have a GUI.  But I just don't see that Matlab's GUI interface
>is all that useful, so it would be helpful to understand what it
>provides that is so essential.

looking at what engineers and scientists around me use in terms of 
Matlab GUI, in approximately decreasing order of importance:

- the "visual debugger" (i.e., with a little arrow next to the 
current source line, go/stop/step buttons and all that stuff)

- the workspace pane, which gives quick & easy overview over the 
current variables, their dimensions, etc. (especially useful in 
combination with debugger)

- command history pane

- the profiler, which is really nice in recent Matlabs (even though 
Octave doesn't have one, so it's not relevant for the GUI discussion)

- the editor, although there's really no need to since there's so 
many other good editors around.

I personally tend to use the command-line version whenever possible, 
but I do understand people who find above features useful and hence 
stick with the GUI.

At 13:37 Uhr -0400 2008-03-28, John W. Eaton wrote:
>Please don't take these comments the wrong way.  I'm seriously trying
>to understand what it is that makes the Matlab GUI so essential to so
>many users.  Perhaps it is only a few small features that would not be
>so hard to add to Octave.

I don't think Octave should do much in the way of GUI, simply provide 
good hooks for 3rd-party IDE apps to support the features that people 
are used to in the Matlab GUI.

-M