Octave was originally intended to be companion software for an
undergraduate-level textbook on chemical reactor design being written by
James B. Rawlings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and John
G. Ekerdt of the University of Texas.
Clearly, Octave is now much more than just another `courseware' package
with limited utility beyond the classroom. Although our initial goals
were somewhat vague, we knew that we wanted to create something that
would enable students to solve realistic problems, and that they could
use for many things other than chemical reactor design problems.
There are those who would say that we should be teaching the students
Fortran instead, because that is the computer language of engineering,
but every time we have tried that, the students have spent far too much
time trying to figure out why their Fortran code crashes and not enough
time learning about chemical engineering. With Octave, most students
pick up the basics quickly, and are using it confidently in just a few
hours.
Although it was originally intended to be used to teach reactor design,
it has been used in several other undergraduate and graduate
courses in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of
Texas, and the math department at the University of Texas has been using
it for teaching differential equations and linear algebra as well. If
you find it useful, please let us know. We are always interested to
find out how Octave is being used in other places.
Virtually everyone thinks that the name Octave has something to do with
music, but it is actually the name of a former professor of mine who
wrote a famous textbook on chemical reaction engineering, and who was
also well known for his ability to do quick `back of the envelope'
calculations. We hope that this software will make it possible for many
people to do more ambitious computations just as easily.
Everyone is encouraged to share this software with others under the
terms of the GNU General Public License (see Copying) as described
at the beginning of this manual. You are also encouraged to help make
Octave more useful by writing and contributing additional functions for
it, and by reporting any problems you may have.
- Many people have already contributed to Octave's development. In
addition to John W. Eaton, the following people have helped write parts
of Octave or helped out in various other ways.
-
Thomas Baier (baier@ci.tuwien.ac.at) wrote the original versions of
popen, pclose, execute, sync_system, and
async_system.
-
Karl Berry (karl@cs.umb.edu) wrote the kpathsea library that
allows Octave to recursively search directory paths for function and
script files.
-
Georg Beyerle (gbeyerle@awi-potsdam.de) contributed code to save values
in Matlab's .mat-file format, and has provided many useful bug
reports and suggestions.
-
John Campbell (jcc@bevo.che.wisc.edu) wrote most of the file and
C-style input and output functions.
-
Brian Fox (bfox@gnu.ai.mit.edu) wrote the readline library used
for command history editing, and the portion of this manual that
documents it.
-
Klaus Gebhardt ported
Octave to OS/2 and worked with Michel Juillard
on the port to DOS.
-
A. Scottedward Hodel (scotte@eng.auburn.edu) contributed a number
of functions including expm, qzval, qzhess,
syl, lyap, and balance.
-
Kurt Hornik (Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at) provided the corrcoef,
cov, fftconv, fftfilt, gcd, lcd,
kurtosis, null, orth, poly, polyfit,
roots, and skewness functions, supplied documentation for
these and numerous other functions, rewrote the Emacs mode for editing
Octave code and provided its documentation, and has helped tremendously
with testing. He has also been a constant source of new ideas for
improving Octave.
-
Phil Johnson (johnsonp@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu) has helped to make Linux
releases available.
-
Michel Juillard ported Octave to DOS systems.
-
Friedrich Leisch (leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at) provided the
mahalanobis function.
-
Ken Neighbors (wkn@leland.stanford.edu) has provided many useful bug
reports and comments on Matlab compatibility.
-
Rick Niles (niles@axp745.gsfc.nasa.gov) rewrote Octave's plotting
functions to add line styles and the ability to specify an unlimited
number of lines in a single call. He also continues to track down
odd incompatibilities and bugs.
-
Mark Odegard (meo@sugarland.unocal.com) provided the initial
implementation of fread, fwrite, feof, and
ferror.
-
Tony Richardson (tony@guts.biomed.uakron.edu) wrote Octave's image
processing functions as well as most of the original polynomial
functions.
-
R. Bruce Tenison (Bruce.Tenison@eng.auburn.edu) wrote the hess and
schur functions.
-
Teresa Twaroch (twaroch@ci.tuwien.ac.at) provided the functions
gls and ols.
-
Andreas Weingessel (Andreas.Weingessel@ci.tuwien.ac.at) wrote the
audio functions lin2mu, loadaudio, mu2lin,
playaudio, record, saveaudio, and setaudio.
-
Fook Fah Yap (ffy@eng.cam.ac.uk) provided the fft and
ifft functions and valuable bug reports for early versions.
- Special thanks to the following people and organizations for
supporting the development of Octave:
- Digital Equipment Corporation, for an equipment grant as part of their
External Research Program.
- Sun Microsystems, Inc., for an Academic Equipment grant.
- International Business Machines, Inc., for providing equipment as part
of a grant to the University of Texas College of Engineering.
- Texaco Chemical Company, for providing funding to continue the
development of this software.
- The University of Texas College of Engineering, for providing a
Challenge for Excellence Research Supplement, and for providing an
Academic Development Funds grant.
- The State of Texas, for providing funding through the Texas
Advanced Technology Program under Grant No. 003658-078.
- Noel Bell, Senior Engineer, Texaco Chemical Company, Austin Texas.
- James B. Rawlings, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Chemical Engineering.
- Richard Stallman, for writing GNU.
Portions of this document have been adapted from the gawk,
readline, gcc, and C library manuals, published by the Free
Software Foundation, 59 Temple Place---Suite 330, Boston, MA
02111--1307, USA.
This project would not have been possible without the GNU software used
in and used to produce Octave.
Copyright © 1996, 1997 John W. Eaton.
Modified by
Klaus Gebhardt
, 1997