Talk:Scilab
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[edit] Subjective comments
The comments "documentation is far inferior" and "Matlab is far easier to learn than Scilab" do not seem to make justice to version 4 of Scilab, currently available. These comments seems biased to favor Matlab. I'll replace them with more objective versions. I have been using Scilab since Matlab decided not to release a version for WinXP64, and I have found Scilab superior to Matlab in its programming interface. Scilab is actually simpler to program than Matlab, and more flexible, making it better for many scientific purposes. Matlab beats Scilab in the amount of toolboxes, and performance is some scenarios; but Scilab beats Matlab in ease to produce large programs and the ability to distribute code with colaborators that belong to heterogeneous domains (Matlab is NOT readily available to everyone). After trying Scilab, there is no go back.
- I agree that the previous version was bad, but the newer isn't better. Storing public function in separate files seems minor with respect to other features related to functions, such as visibility (public/private), subfunctions, anonymous functions, etc. Comments like "harder to implement", "more flexible", "easier to program" (contradictory but provided without details), "common myth", "that is not true", and "in fact" don't have their place here. Engelec 10:57, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
H3xx 23:44, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm kind of torn between loving and hating Scilab over MATLAB. On the one hand, I use Linux (though I've been informed that MATLAB has a Linux version too) and don't want to have to pay for a piece of software to do the same job as well as a free one. On the other hand, Scilab is SLOOOOWW during some operations (despite the fact that functions are compiled into Scilab byte-code). Also, take a look at this snippet of a help page:
pvm_bcast - broacasts a message to all members of a group
Calling Sequence
[info] = pvm_bcast(group, buff, msgtag)
Parameters
* group : string, string group name of an existing group.
* buff : data to be send (any Scilab object).
* msgtag : integer, message tag supplied by the user.
* info : integer,
The documentation is badly-translated at best and downright confusing at worst. Regardless, I think Scilab's PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is very cool as long as you can read enough documentation to accurately program for it.
