GNU Octave
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GNU Octave 4.0.0 RC1 running on Linux
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| Developer(s) | John W. Eaton and many others |
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| Initial release | 1988 |
| Stable release | 4.2.0 (November 13, 2016) |
| Preview release | 4.2.0 rc4 (November 9, 2016) |
| Repository | hg |
| Written in | C, C++, Fortran |
| Available in | 19 languages |
| Type | Scientific computing |
| License | GPL |
| Website | gnu |
GNU Octave is software featuring a high-level programming language, primarily intended for numerical computations. Octave helps in solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language. Since it is part of the GNU Project, it is free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Octave is one of the major free alternatives to Matlab, others being FreeMat and Scilab. Scilab, however, puts less emphasis on (bidirectional) syntactic compatibility with Matlab than Octave does.
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. Version 4.0.0 was released on May 29, 2015.
The program is named after Octave Levenspiel, a former professor of the principal author. Levenspiel is known for his ability to perform quick back-of-the-envelope calculations.
In addition to use on desktops for personal scientific computing, Octave is used in academia and industry. For example, Octave was used on a massive parallel computer at Pittsburgh supercomputing center to find vulnerabilities related to guessing social security numbers.
The Octave language is an interpreted programming language. It is a structured programming language (similar to C) and supports many common C standard library functions, and also certain UNIX system calls and functions. However, it does not support passing arguments by reference.
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