MATLAB is a commercial software package written by The Mathworks. Quoting from their web page:
Numeric computation, technical graphics and visualization, and an intuitive programming language for applications in engineering and science
MATLAB is a complete environment for high-level programming, as well as interactive data analysis. MATLAB excels at numerical computations, especially when dealing with vectors or matrices of data. Symbolic math is available through an add-on toolbox that uses a Maple kernel.
There are too many toolbox add-ons to describe here. Poke around the web site if you have some interest.
Questions about the name "MATLAB" often arise. MATLAB stands for "MATrix LABoratory". See http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/learn_matlab/ch1intro.shtml for an overiew of MATLAB.
The newsgroup comp.soft-sys.matlab (sometimes abbreviated cssm)
is a forum for discussing issues related to the use of MATLAB. It
occasionally includes questions related to similar software packages
like Octave. Any topic related to MATLAB is appropriate. Additionally,
there will be occasional discussions regarding related math topics in a
more abstract form.
The original charter for the group, created in early 1993, can be found at http://www.landfield.com/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/comp/comp.soft-sys.matlab.
Before posting, please skim through this document to see if your question has already been answered. If it is has not, there may be information here that may help you better understand the issue and phrase your question.
Try the standard newsgroup archive at http://groups.google.com.
Many people are also now using the web-based newsreader provided by the MathWorks at their website, which contains archives back to mid-2000. It provides full posting capability. See http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/.
There is also a complete, searchable archive of cssm at http://mathforum.org/epigone/comp.soft-sys.matlab/. It probably contains the earliest articles of these services.
GNU Octave is a freely availabe software package with a language "mostly compatible with MATLAB": http://www.octave.org.
Scilab "is a scientific software package for numerical computations in a user-friendly environment". It is fully open source and has a parallel version. http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/.
IDL (Interactive Data Language) is a commericial software package with applications similar to MATLAB. It is very well suited to image processing and 3D visualization. IDL is produced by Research Systems Inc., http://www.rsinc.com.
O-Matrix is a commercial MATLAB-like program. In fact it has a MATLAB compatibility mode, which the authors claim can execute native MATLAB code 5-10 times faster than MATLAB. Readers who have used this package are encouraged to send me a more detailed explanation. http://www.omatrix.com
LyME runs a reasonable subset of MATLAB code on the Palm platform. Available for free at http://www.calerga.com. Thanks to Martin Cohen for this info.
Fredrik Hekland suggests: Back in the days when I used OS/2, Euler was a good replacement for Matlab (at least for the simple operations I needed at that time). I see that Euler is still living, now as GNU GPL'ed OSS. http://mathsrv.ku-eichstaett.de/MGF/homes/grothman/euler/
Stefan Mueller is involved in developing a MATLAB-like program called JMathLib, written in Java. See http://mathlib.sourceforge.net/.
This FAQ is actively maintained and should be up to date. All submissions are welcome; please email submissions to the maintainer: boettcher@ll.mit.edu. Submissions could be new questions (preferably with answers), fixes such as dead links or typos, extra information to elaborate on an answer, or a replacement answer.
Questions and answers will be edited, and will be attributed. Anything appearing without attribution was written by the FAQ maintainer or by someone listed in the contributor section, unless it is explicitly indicated as unknown or anonymous source. Where answers are quoted from Usenet news articles, they will always be attributed.
This FAQ was created by Peter Boettcher in early 2001. He is also the current maintainer.
Thanks to Denis Gilbert for a substantial set of questions and answers, as well as feedback on existing answers. Steve Lord has contributed a number of additions and refinements. Many others have contributed suggestions and answers, which are individually attributed. Thanks!
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