Octave and Freemat

[Sebastien Loisel]

Dear Octave maintainers,

Hello, it's been a while. I'm tinkering, in my spare time, with Freemat and
I am looking to see which parts of Octave Forge can benefit Freemat. Right
now, as a test, I want to copy orth.m into Freemat. It's a simple function
with a simple implementation and only one parameter that always means the
same thing.

I noticed that the copyright header says something like "This file is part
of Octave..." Now, I don't want to usurp Octave's good name by claiming that
Freemat is part of Octave, so what we're thinking of doing is to prepend a
note, something like: "This file, which is distributed with Freemat, was
originally copied from Octave; original copyright notice follows." Does that
sound good?

A second issue is that for some files, I will probably be making some
changes. Some changes are necessary for compatibility, for example, Freemat
doesn't understand comments that start with ##, and expects comments to
start with %. Other changes are improvements in functionality and
compatibility with MATLAB, for instance, the roots in the version of Octave
that came with my cygwin, crashed on roots([1e-200 1e200 1]), while the
versions in MATLAB and the upcoming Freemat, have no problem with it.

The Freemat developers have expressed the desire to have these improvements
merged back into Octave-Forge. As a hobbyist, I'm not sure that I want to
babysit both the Freemat side of things and the Octave side of things, but
if someone wants to pick up the slack on the Octave side (or if someone else
from Freemat volunteers), I would be happy to provide patches for Octave
Forge.

I appreciate your comments,

-- 
Sébastien Loisel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/attachments/20080304/79f23e93/attachment.html