Pseudo code

[Nicolas FEZANS]

Dear dev people,

I was wondering (concerning a possible toolbox development) whether
there exists any possibility for making pseudo-code (more or less like
the .p file of Matlab) with Scilab (my guess is no). If no, is it part
of any planning or even development wish?

I know that pseudo-code is not really in the spirit of open-source
community, but not having this kind of possibility will clearly
prevent a lot of developments from being made on Scilab and that could
lead to some high quality freely accessible (but not open-source)
toolboxes that could then been converted later into open-source
project. Some of the best open-source programs were indeed non
open-source project before (e.g. Firefox, OpenOffice,... ;-) ).
Long-term interest for open-source project is not necessarily to
prevent such contributions by adopting too restrictive rules. Indeed
one cannot prevent contributions from being made accessible in any
compiled form, the only difference is that cross-platform
compatibilities will probably be quite bad.

Of course there is also the technical aspect on how to implement such
a possibility within an open-source project. If a piece of code in
open-source makes the conversion between the pseudo-code and normal
Scilab code or if the encrypted code is stored in memory without any
protection, pseudo-codes won't really be protected (what can be read,
can be copied!).


Regards,

Nicolas