scilab developement ideas

[Lukas Wischounig]

dear scilab developers,


first i would like to thank you for your work in creating such a mighty
scientific, open source software platform.

Since my beginning days in studying geology the need of an "easy to program" and
flexible programming environment for general scientific / engineering purpose
was clear. commercial gis was that time limited to 2d and therefore not really
useful for earth scientific purposes. Furthermore the vector editing
functionality of gis was (and in most cases is until now) extremly lousy.
so that times matlab figured out to be the tool of choise in scientific -
technical computing with using autocad as a vector editor.

in the meantime gis systems have become (at least) 3d and with grass a powerful
open source platform has reached thousands of students and scientists.
gis functionality is at the moment a wide used task from car navi systems to
scientific purpose.

high price commercial software like gocad have developed in the recent years and
has set the benchmark for geological software.


currently the opencascade technology provides a state of the art and open source
industrial standard in cad/cam/cae functionality. as seen
in your developer pages more and more functionality from superb software from
kitware (e.g. vtk) gets usable from within scilab.


lacking in knowledge about the true power of scilab, i began exporing the scilab
functionality with the book from CAMPELL, CHANCELIER,
NIKOUKHAH no more than some days ago. the possibilities with scilab seem
endless, the "simplicity" and functionality of the scilab
language goes far beyond everything i have ever seen in matlab yet.


so some questions raise immediately:

do you plan to add opencascade functionality into scilab, would you think this
is useful?

do you plan to add gis functionality into scilab? Or how could someone with poor
to average programming skills control grass gis from within scilab? (not at all
i assume...). have you heard about any such project in a forum?

will more kitware stuff be linked to scilab (e.g. itk?)



i have dreamt of an open source, extendable "swiss army knife" for (earth)
scientific / engineering purposes for many years now. scilab shows a way where
all necessary additional functionality could be added into one mighty and slim
syntaxed scientific computing environment, which is open source and platform
spanning.


best regards, thanx for your time and merry christmas



lukas wischounig
dept. of geology
university of innsbruck
austria