List of most highly used matlab functions.

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Jul-2008, David Bateman wrote:

| While looking randomly around I came across the web page
| 
| http://www.jmatlab.org/benchmark.html
| 
| that discusses the most used matlab functions as defined by Nick Higham.
| It seems that the only matlab functions in this list of 111 functions
| that are not in the core of Octave are
| 
| gallery, ezplot, bvp4c, fminbnd, fzero

I guess it depends on who the user(s) are.  I've never needed any of
these functions, and didn't even know that bvp4c existed.

The gallery function might be nice to have, but I don't see it as
essential.

I supose ezplot would be helpful for some.

It seems to me that bvp4c is rather specialized.  I imagine there are
whole swarming masses of users who never need to solve multipoint
boundary value problems, or even know what they are.

We do see a number of messages looking for fminbnd and fzero though.

| As for fminbnd and fzero, they are both in octave-forge and appear to be
| reasonably complete so perhaps we should port these to Octave itself.

Unless it is necessary for these functions to use (approximately) the
same algorithms as are used by the Matlab versions of these functions,
then I think fminbnd could be written as a wrapper around Octave's sqp
function, and fzero could be written as a wrapper around fsolve.  The
same could be done for fmincon and fminunc (I even have minimal
versions of fmincon and fminunc if someone would like to take them as
a starting point).

Oh, now I see that fminbnd and fzero are defined to work scalar
functions.  In that case, I really don't understand why these
functions even exist.  Why is it necessary to have special funtions
for scalars?  And why would we want separate (weak?) algorithms for
these functions instead of just wrapping the general purpose
optimization functions?

jwe