Octave support?

[isbadawi]

I was wondering if there was interest in making this project compatible with Octave in addition to Matlab? I looked into it a bit and it seems like it might not be too much work (but I haven't tried anything yet so there might be more issues).

• The command line arguments for Octave are different (e.g. --eval instead of -r to run code), but that's not hard to fix
• The json package being used won't work as is because Octave doesn't support packages (namespaces) and also doesn't support the same syntax for calling Java objects (can use these functions for compatibility); could use a different json package, or try to fix up this one
• I'm also not sure whether the mex part will work as is, but it might.

Is there any other potential problem you can think of? I could work on this if there's interest.

[jenshnielsen]

Note that there is also oct2py https://pypi.python.org/pypi/oct2py and the IPython octave magic based on this package.

[isbadawi]

Interesting, I hadn't seen that. Seems oct2py spawns Octave as a subprocess and communicates with it using ptys or pipes, whereas this project runs a MATLAB server. What are the pros and cons of these two approaches? This project seems to more gracefully handle syntax errors, at least.

Ultimately I'm working on a tool which needs to be able to execute MATLAB code, and I'd like it to work with either MATLAB or Octave. I guess I could write adapters to abstract over these two libraries, but I'd prefer if I could use the same approach for both.

[isbadawi]

Implemented in #75.