Octave within perl?

[Colin Telmer]

I am currently using perl to post-process some output from a financial
application. Up until this point I have been able to make due with the
simple mathematical functionality of perl, but I now want to go beyond
this to compute some more complicated statitics. I realize pdl and friends
exist, but I would prefer to use octave as I already use it in another
part of this project, and moreover, I am quite comfortable and happy with
it:) Anyway, what I would optimally like to do is to:
1) open an octave session from within perl (possibly passing some startup
information) and leave it running to accept further commands.
2) pass commands to the octave session sequentially from perl.

I could add much more to this list, but I thought I would begin simply to
see if this is possinble within the limited time I have to do this. My
other simpler idea is just to have a shell script call perl to produce
some flat files to be read into octave. However, the first way seems much
more flexible, and it seems very similar to how emacs runs inferior-octave
sessions. 

Any help is gratefully appreciated. Cheers, Colin.

--
Colin Telmer, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
<mailto:address@hidden>
<http://www.telmer.com>