Octave is a free computer program for performing numerical computations, which is mostly compatible with MATLAB. It is part of the GNU project. Note that Octave is not a computer algebra system. Octave is rather a tool for scientific computation.

The project was conceived around 1988. At first it was intended to be a companion to a chemical reactor design course. Real development was only started by John W. Eaton in 1992. The first alpha release dates back to January 4, 1993 and on February 17, 1994 version 1.0 was released.

The name has nothing to do with music (see Octave). It was the name of a former professor of one of the authors of Octave who was known for his ability to quickly come up with good approximations to numerical problems.

Technical details

• Octave is written in C++ using STL libraries.
• Octave has an interpreter that interprets the Octave language.
• Octave itself is extensible using dynamically loadable modules.
• Octave interpreter works in tandem with the Gnuplot software to create plots, graphs, and charts, and to save or print them.

Octave, the language

• Octave language is interpreted.
• It is simply structured programming as in C language
• Octave does not support argument passing by reference. Only pass-by-value is supported.
• Octave program exists as a group of functions called from a script.
• Octave language has supports for many common C standard library constructs.
• Octave language can be extended to support UNIX system calls and functions.
• Octave language is matrix-based and provides various functions for matrix operation.
• It does not have classes or objects, but it supports structures as in the C language.

Because Octave is made available under the GNU General Public License, it may be freely copied and used. The program runs under most Unix and Unix-like operating systems, as well as Microsoft Windows.

See also

• Axiom
• Scilab
• FreeMat , another open-source MATLAB-like environment
• Python programming language
  • SciPy, a library of scientific tools
  • matplotlib , a MATLAB-like plotting library

External links

• Octave.org Home Page
• GNU Octave Reference Manual by John W. Eaton (ISBN 0954161726)
• Octave-forge community development page
• Octave wiki (click twice—page redirects cause some browsers to time out)