SciLab

SciLab tools

SciLab is a free software environment which offers many of the same posibillities as Matlab. This section contains some tools which have been developed for use with Scilab.

Automatic conversion of Matlab .m files into Scilab .sci files
The internal matlab to scilab conversion tool in Scilab is still in the beta stage and did not work reliably for my code. The perl script m2sci.pl was created in order to convert matlab .m files into scilab .sci files. It is currently a very simple implementation, but is easily extended to include more functionality.
Generation of Scilab help files
The perl script sci2htm.pl was created to automatically generate Scilab help files for functions which are defined in a *.sci file. The help files for each function will be generated based on the comments following directly after the function header in the .sci file.
sci2htm.pl should be called with the command sci2htm.pl scilabfunfile.sci in a unix/linux environment, or with the command perl sci2htm.pl scilabfunfile.sci in a MS environment.
Alternatively, if sci2htm.pl is located (in a unix/linux environment) in a directory available through the PATH it may be ran directly from Scilab using the Scilab function sci2htm.sci. The scilab call getf("sci2htm.sci");sci2htm("sci2htm.sci") generated the local help file: sci2htm.htm.
Help on Scilab functions defined in the local directory
Scilab has a help functionality which requires that separate help files are generated and installed in separate directories. In my opinion this is too laborious when doing prototyping. For this purpose the matlab approach is more suitable, where help information is stored in each .m files in the comment lines following imediately after the function definition.
lhelp.sci was created in order to accomplish some of the same functionality. See lhelp.htm for more information.
String manipulation using regular expressions
Regular expressions are not implemented in the SciLab. The regexp.sci function implements regular expressions for string manipulation using perl. See help file for more information regexp.htm.

Last updated: november 2003