JWE Project Ideas: Difference between revisions

This is a large project, but one that will likely have to be tackled at some point.

We need to handle UTF-8 (or whatever) characters properly in all parts of Octave.  Try to do this in a Matlab-compatible way.

* Make the load and save commands compatible with Matlab's HDF5-based file format.  Matlab users expect this and we need something like this to support large arrays anyway.  As much as possible, the initial implementation should be written in Octave's scripting language and the proposed [[Low-level interface to HDF5 functions]] so that it can easily be updated and patched as needed while we are still working out the details.  Only later should we consider translating performance-critical parts to C++, and then, only if really necessary.  

* Phase out Octave's own text and binary formats.  Too much effort is required to maintain the code to support all the various formats.

Create a thin wrapper for the HDF5 library.  As much as possible, make it compatible with the [https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/low-level-functions.html Matlab interface to HDF5].  However, we may support newer functions (as of 2020/10/30, the list of Matlab functions appears to correspond to an older version of the library than is presently available in the HDF5 library itself) and support for legacy functions has a low priority.

Also as of 2020/10/30, [[User:jwe|jwe]] is working on this project.  Help is welcome!

RandStream and Other RNG issues

This is likely a large project, but it would be nice to have updated, compatible interfaces.

Implement mxMakeReal and mxMakeComplex functions.

A proof-of-concept implementation was done several years ago by a

and Octave internals.

This feature might be nice to have but it has a low priority.

Should we support this feature?  Should we refactor the implementation of array objects to make this job easier?

Should just read file and list info, not create dummy scope.  Likewise for whos function.