> > Could you explain what does that Matlab IDE do? > > If I understand > 1) on-going execution of code (REPL) > 2) debugger > 3) easy visualization of data (though I am not sure what does that mean) > 4) creating GUI for a new application >
The most important thing the Matlab IDE does is it makes the user feel like the software is more finished, polished, and integrated compared to something like PDL. When a Matlab user tries to use PDL, everything feels disjointed and unconnected in comparison. The Matlab IDE does offer some niceties that are not trivial. For example, the text editor not only has syntax checking, but it also has a lint checker and can offer useful sugestions for improving your code. Line-by-line debugging is also handy and I'll confess I've never gotten used to console-based debugging. (If you could get this into Padre, you would be my hero.) Matlab also allows you to examine the data in your REPL, including a tree-based view for tree-like data structures. This greatly alleviates the number of 'print var_z' statements in your interactive window. I've never created a GUI application using Matlab nor would I ever want to, so I can't speak to that. Obviously PDL doesn't have anything that can match Matlab's capabilities, but I bet that you could create an even nicer GUI using Perl. I don't think you'd have a nice GUI builder, but you could certainly do it without much troubl. Honestly, I think Matlab is the wrong tool for that job. When it comes to visualizing data, Matlab makes things pretty easy. It offers low-level access to things like axes so that you can programatically tweak them pretty nicely. I'm fairly certain that PDL has the same set of low-level capabilities as Matlab, though whether those capabilities are in PLplot, PGPLOT, or OpenGL is not known to me at the moment. Matlab does 'better' than PDL in that it also has a thorough set of menues that allow you to interact with your plots so you can manually set axis scales, color palets, axis titles, and probably much more. Whether this is a feature or a bug is a question of philosphy. I didn't use it often when I used Matlab. If I'm just trying to visualize my data to get a feel for what it's doing, then I don't need to tweak an axis or a title. If I'm generating a plot for a presentation or a publication I prefer to write a script so that if I change my mind on some tweak two days after I've created it, I can edit it in my script and use that to generate 20 new plots for me. Also, when I need to generate similar plots on new data, I can just copy the script into my new directory and start from something that's pretty close to what I want. David
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