Re: Octave Help Mode?

[David Hansen <david.hansen@gmx.net>]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:41:18 +0200 Richard G. Riley wrote:

> Christian Herenz <herenz@physik.hu-berlin.de> writes:
>
>> That is a nice idea, but would not solve my problem that I was
>> actually forced to hand in the results with matlab, otherwise I was
>> told today by a professor my results would not be accepted. But I am
>> working on this issue right now, cause my course is called
>> "Computational Physics" not "Computational Physics with Matlab".
>
> Why on earth do you feel that your Professor should master every
> application out there that a student might feel is his right to use? Did
> it cross your mind that he does not have the skill in Octave that you
> have?

Erm, if he teaches *computational* physics his skills should be good
enough to read and understand another language that is almost full
compatible to his favorite language.

In my numerical physics course we had completely free choice of the
language (but only got support for C ;).

And by the way, I think it's very questionable if it still counts as
"science" if you use proprietary software, if you don't have at least
full access to the source code.

David