liboctave standalone

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Feb-2003, Marcin Baranowski <address@hidden> wrote:

| It is possible to use liboctave as standalone library to link with C++
| applications. It has nice C++ classes interface. 
| Unfortunately, it requires some libraries, that absolutery aren't needed by
| non-interactive applications (or applications with graphical frontends).
| 
| It's possible to move some symbols from liboctave to octave binary, for 
example.
| These are: pic/cmd-edit.o pic/cmd-hist.o pic/oct-rl-edit.o pic/oct-rl-hist.o
| (both requires libreadline and libncurses).

I would prefer to split liboctave into several pieces instead of
moving these to the Octave binary.

| Also, little change in
| liboctave/str-vec.cc: 
| int line_length = command_editor::terminal_cols ();
| to
| int line_length = 80;

I think it would be better to use something like

  typedef int (*FP) (void);
  extern FP lo_terminal_cols_fcn;

  ...

  line_length = lo_terminal_cols_fcn ? lo_terminal_cols_fcn : 80;

and have lo_terminal_cols_fcn be initialized to
command_editor::terminal_cols if we link with the library that
contains the command_editor class.  Otherwise, it defaults to 0.

There may be other problems with the kpathsearch library, if we ever
reach a point where that can be removed from Octave.

I don't have time to work on a patch for this now, but if someone can
actually make it work, then I would consider it.  I tried once, but
ran into various problems, I think with some circular dependencies
between liboctinterp and liboctave.

jwe