Re: "Matlab to Scilab for Dummies" anywhere?

Hello Joseph,


Anyone know of an open-source clone of Mathematica?
Or is that too much to hope for... ;) ?

Don't know, but maybe Maxima
(http://maxima.sourceforge.net/index.shtml)
might fill the bill?

Ooh, I'll have to try that, thanks!

In school, we had Mathematica workstations in several of the
engineering computer labs. One of the more memorable tasks I had a
workstation do was to solve a system of nonlinear equations - about 100
of them (for sizing a distillation column).

An Actual sign of progress in the software world, In my father's day all
there was was Fortran and linpack in batch (overnight). Not quite the
same.


Progress? Back at the university we had to program in Fortran on punch cards. That was a heck of a lot easier than these "modern" math programs. Much less learning curve.

After finally dumping Scilab yesterday I tried Octave and dumped it as well. Wouldn't read Matlab files properly. All you had was an archaic command line screen that wouldn't even behave like DOS and spit out all kinds of cryptic error messages. These programs might be very powerful and practical for a student who has all day long but not for busy engineers.

Maybe I write my own program to calculate wave digital filters some day. One that actually works.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
.