Graphical octave frontend

[Ulrich Kuettler]

Hi octave developers:

At first, let me say thank you. Octave is not only a very valuable
piece of software but also a very interesting one. I really enjoyed
looking at the source. It is surprisingly clear and understandable.

The reason I looked at octave is that I wanted to empower kformula
with a numerical engine. kformula is the formula editor of the koffice
suite. (www.koffice.org) My intention is to build a MathCAD like
interactive koffice application. A very first prove-of-concept
implementation is now available at
http://rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~uk327083/kengineer.tar.bz2 It needs
the current cvs versions of both octave and koffice. Build
instructions are included.

There are also a few screenshots: 
http://rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~uk327083/kengineer-matrix.png
http://rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~uk327083/kengineer-pyth.png

I hope you share my enthusiasm about it because to go further I need
your kind help and support. My aim is to link against out of the box
octave libraries. But there might be a few changes necessary. For
example could the build process be much smoother if octave's config.h
had another name. (I'm also very much in favour of John Eaton's
suggestion to introduce an "octave" namespace.) Another issue I
haven't solved yet is how a library's user finds the error messages
when error_state != 0.

But there will be many more problems and questions. For this project
to succeed I'll definitely need your support and advice. The result on
the other hand would be quite an amazing tool.

Regards,
Uli