[Fsf-india] FEATURE: The Penguin as Engineer...

[Ramakrishnan M]

 || On Mon, 13 May 2002 00:24:18 +0530 (IST)
 || Frederick Noronha <fred@bytesforall.org> wrote: 

 fn> Matlab, a software many engineering students talk about, is very useful for
 fn> solving all types of systems involving extensive matrix operations. It has
 fn> its specific programming language with built in functions. "Usually all the
 fn> engineering problems get reduced to a system of differential equations and
 fn> involve matrix operations, so its a kind of software that everyone finds
 fn> useful irrespective of discipline," as one engineer in this debated noted. 

Being an EE, when I was a student, I had faced the problems with "Matlab-madness"
among students, text books and profs. There are now a lot of Free Software 
alternatives to Matlab, the notable among them being Scilab and GNU Octave, with
the latter aiming at Matlab-compatibility. I am no longer using a matlab-like
system, but looks like these programs have come a long way since I used them two
years back. Scilab, comes from a world renowned research institution, INRIA of
france. GNU Octave is also very well maintained, and has a lot of toolboxes for
different engineering application. (Originally it was meant for Chemical 
Engineering).

Also I should add, that the electrical engineering dept at IIT Madras, strongly
advocates the use of free software for all kinds of students (VLSI, communication
and signal processing jobs).

Another thing to note (yet another example of a case of non-copylefted free
software being used in propreitary software) is that Matlab uses FFTW, which
is the world's fastest FFW library.

-- 
    Ramakrishnan M         (http://www.hackGNU.org/)
    Use Free Software          (http://www.gnu.org/)