For questions pertaining to Octave, a programming language primarily intended for scientific computations. Use this tag for questions about installing, configuring or operating Octave (e.g., resolving operational failures). Questions about programming are off-topic here and should be asked on Stack Overflow.
octave should be used for pertaining to Octave, a programming language primarily intended for scientific computations. Use this tag for questions about installing, configuring or operating Octave (e.g., resolving operational failures). Questions about programming are off-topic here and should be asked on Stack Overflow.
GNU Octave is a high-level scientific programming language intended for numerical computations. It is largely compatible with MATLAB.
Octave is a free software and runs on GNU/Linux, macOS, BSD and Windows systems. It is one of the major free alternatives to MATLAB, the others being Scilab and FreeMat. Scilab, however is less compatible with MATLAB than Octave and FreeMat has not been updated since June 2013.
Octave has a graphical interface and a command line interface. By default, running octave in a terminal starts Octave CLI while octave --force-gui starts the GUI.
Octave can be configured from the GUI and from the ~/.octaverc configuration file.
While MATLAB has toolkits, Octave allows the installation of additional packages. Many MATLAB toolkits have their equivalent in Octave packages. Packages can be downloaded from the Octave Forge. You can download and install a package from the Forge using the following command in Octave CLI:
octave:1> pkg install -forge <package name>
Basic syntax examples can be found on the Wikipedia page and in all the documentations (see "Useful links" section below). As in MATLAB you can get documentation for any function using the help command as in
octave:2> help plot
Further reading
- Differences between Octave and MATLAB?
- Why/when should I prefer MATLAB over Octave?
- Why is Octave slower than MATLAB?
- How do I detect if I'm running MATLAB or Octave?
- How to install Octave without GUI in Ubuntu 16.04?
- Error running Octave in Ubuntu 16.04
- Octave package installation: “couldn't create installation directory”
- Run GNU Octave script on multiple cores
- octave tag on Stack Overflow
- octave tag on Computational Science Stack Exchange
