Is scilab 5.x a VIABLE alternative to scilab 4.x ???

[Richard Owlett]

I'm just about as far from a power user as possible.
And I just got "BURNED" :<

Try this code fragment (based on documentation for loadwave which
is common to *BOTH* 4.1.2 and 5.1.1)

// At first we create 0.5 seconds of sound parameters.
t=soundsec(0.5);
// Then we generate the sound: a two channels sound.
s=[sin(2*%pi*440*t);sin(2*%pi*350*t)];
savewave(TMPDIR+'/foo.wav',s);
[x,y] = loadwave(TMPDIR+'/foo.wav');
critical_data = y(7)

The *QUESTION*

Why should I consider moving to 5.x?

[I've also problems with documentation (or its voids).

[Richard Owlett]

BURNED *again*

I had used buttondialog

[mike]

I think the scilab 5 development is not really advancing scilab. Still
scicos is not really working afaik, compatibility issues make the
installation on different systems a question of luck, no debugger is in
sight (and what the different entries in this board say there will maybe
never one), and different bugs are still to be discovered.
From a functionality point of view there was no advance, it looks more
like there was made a step backwards.
Let's hope that the community which is keeping scicoslab 4.3 up will go
on with this project.

regards
mike

Richard Owlett schrieb:

[Alain Gopher]

I agree: Scilab5 is a mess.
Apart from its size (Scilab 5x is 120MegaBytes and Scilab4/Scicoslab
30 Megabytes) Scilab5 does not afford any significant improvement...
Instead:
-No more Scicos toolbox in Scilab5.2. What is Xcos? Why a fork of
Scicos? Who is developing Xcos? Is the development really done in
cooperation with the Scicos developers?
-No more Scipad. Is there any benefit from removing Scipad from
Scilab?

The heap of bugs fixes in Scilab5 mostly come from a debatable
implementation of Java code!
As a consequence, the overall performance declines... and for example
the edit-graph toolbox, now useless, has been (silently!) removed.