calling c++ or c from octave?

[Francis Poulin]

Hello,

I do research that involves a lot of number crunching.  I often write  
or run codes in fortran/c to produce data that I then visualize and  
analyze using octave.  It's a bit cumbersome at times going back and  
forth and I wonder whether it is possible to do everything within  
octave.

I have read somewhere that it is possible to call programs written in c 
++ (or perhaps c?) from octave.  Is that true?  If so where can I find  
a good tutorial on how to do this?  I found one or two on the web but  
when I actually got around to trying it, the codes didn't actually  
compile.  If there is a tutorial that someone could point out that  
would be super. I am willing to learn c++ if I can have the easy  
functionality of octave with the fast number crunching ability of a  
lower level language.

Cheers,
Francis