Scilab

Scilab - A Matlab Clone

Scilab is, simply, an open source Matlab clone, developed by INRIA (English or French), a research institution in France. Apparently originally conceived as a computer aided automatic control system design tool, it appears to be gradually accreting more and more capability as time goes on. It is my belief that this is a direct result of the open source philosophy essentially being followed by the developers and researchers at INRIA.

You can download binaries for several platforms, including MS Windows. Or, if you are feeling adventurous, you can download the source files and compile them yourself. See, that's the idea of open source: if you feel so inclined, you can read the source, find and fix bugs or just change things so that you like them better.

	Click here to access the Scilab home page.
	Click here to download copious documentation in different formats, including postscript, PDF (Adobe Acrobat portable document format), and plain ol' HTML format.
	Visit the Scilab newsgroup comp.soft-sys.math.scilab on Usenet. It appears to have moderately heavy traffic and I perceive it to be increasing over the past few months.

If you have already developed applications in Matlab, they have a web page devoted to equivalences between Scilab and Matlab built-in functions. For example, in order to calculate the eigenvalues of a matrix A, for example, they would be calculated in Matlab as eig(A) and in Scilab as spec(A). Root loci of a system are calculated and plotted using rootlocus in Matlab and evans in Scilab (as in "Evans root locus").