Octave : A Clone of Matlab

In this world there are a number of clones of Matlab. Even though
Matlab really grew up to take over majority of high-tech industries,
these clones also could manage to survive. There could be two major
reasons behind this: (i) Matlab is relatively high priced (ii) Some people
in academic world felt the urge to reinvent the wheel or may be they
just could not avoid the intellectual urge for continuing a parallel
evolution.

These parallel developments date back to 1980s when the power of
matrix based numerical computation was realised. The general
viewpoint was that the matrix programming could be developed with
an interface that could get away with Fortran syntax with its
declaration of variables of different kinds.

Octave is the closest clone of Matlab. It was developed at University
of Wisconsin by John W Eaton as a companion program of a textbook,
so that students could solve Chemical Engineering problems without
wasting time in debugging ugly-looking Fortran codes. It has a popular
user-base in a number of universities in USA - especially where no or
only a limited number of licenses are available to students.

Octave is available as both source code and binaries for Windows,
Linux, Unix and is freely distributable under the GNU General Public
License (GPL). Click here to download Octave.