There exist two categories of general scientific software: computer algebra systems that perform symbolic computations, and general purpose numerical systems performing numerical computations and designed specifically for scientific applications. The best-known examples in the first category are Maple, Mathematica, Maxima, Axiom, and MuPad. The second category represents a larger market dominated by MATLAB. Scilab, which is free open-source software, belongs to this second category.
Scilab is an interpreted language with dynamically typed objects. Scilab runs, and is available in binary format, for the main available platforms: Unix/Linux workstations (the main software development is performed on Linux workstations), Windows, and MacOSX. MacOSX users can also install Scilab using fink. Compiling Scilab from the source code is also possible and is fairly straightforward.
Scilab was originally named Basile and was developed at INRIA as part of the Meta2 project. Development continued under the name of Scilab by the Scilab group, which was a team of researchers from INRIA Metalau and ENPC. Since 2004, Scilab development has been coordinated by a consortium.
Scilab can be used as a scripting language to test algorithms or to perform numerical computations. But it is also a programming language, and the standard Scilab library contains around 2000 Scilab coded functions. The Scilab syntax is simple, and the use of matrices, which are the fundamental object of scientific calculus, is facilitated through specific functions and operators. These matrices can be of different types including real, complex, string, polynomial, and rational. Scilab programs are thus...
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