GNU Octave

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For other uses of the word octave see Octave (disambiguation)

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 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.

1 Technical details
2 Octave, the language
3 See also
4 External links

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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 gnuplot and Grace software to create plots, graphs, and charts, and to save or print them.

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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 programs exist as a group of functions called from a script.
The Octave language has support for many common C standard library constructs.
The Octave language can be extended to support UNIX system calls and functions.
The 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.
The syntax is very similar to MATLAB, and careful programming will allow a script to run on both Octave and MATLAB.

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.

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