Re: Looking for help?

[David Bateman]

Kelly Boswell wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm a recent graduate of Electronics Engineering and am now a Software
> Engineer for Raytheon.  I decided to take a one-semester break before
> going back for my Masters so maybe I can help put a dent in your very
> large wishlist before I go back? I'd like to someday help develop an IDE
> for Octave (with the wx library) but I think it would be a good idea to
> become familiar with the project first.
> 
> I'm still not a highly experienced programmer (despite my job title) but
> I'm getting better and I think I could be of some help.  Perhaps I could
> start with something small such as bug fixes until I become more
> comfortable with the project?
> 
> Thank you,
> Kelly

Always scratch your own itch.. That is work on a project that interests you.

That being said in the lead-up to Octave 3.0 the priority is bug
squashing and the manual. For bug squashing that just comes down to
using Octave with your own code and finding what it does wrong and
fixing it if you can. Fixing the manual doesn't necessarily need
programming skills and the latest manual can always be found in the last
release. Note its evolved a little bit further in the CVS.

Going further, you could look at the PROJECTS file at

http://velveeta.che.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/octave/PROJECTS?rev=HEAD

One of the larger projects that interests me personally is to rewrite a
an evaluating tree walker to replace the existing evaluator. The
advantage of this is that it might be used in the runtime evaluator
itself, but equally in the debug (one that doesn't just evaluate strings
as the current one does), a profiler and even a compiler. See the code at

http://www.ruena.de/publications.html

for an example, though I don't agree with the conversion of a real
matrix to an integer matrix in the type estimation done here as that
impacts the precision of the results. Also work on that should be done
on the objects branch of the CVS (that will become 3.1 branch after the
release of 3.0) as the symbol table code has already been completely
rewritten in that branch to allow matlab compatible objects and private
directories.

A related project would be the implementation of nested functions, that
implement the matlab compatible scoping rules for nested function.

If a project like that is too much, I just looked at the alphabetical
function index for Matlab 2007b and note that Octave includes in the
core just over half of the Matlab functions. You might pick one of the
missing functions and implement it. I supply my list of functions from
2007b sorted into those that are in the Octave core and those that
aren't. Before implementing a function you should check that it isn't
already in octave-forge.

Lastly, if you do choose a project to work on discuss it here and early
discussion of the code will make it easy to get it committed to the CVS

Regards
David

Matlab2007b_Functions.zip
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