The differences are minor, and in my opinion extremely trivial. The reverse is not necessarily true - Octave tries to 'improve' on Matlab syntax and libraries.

So you won't need to adjust to syntax, or most of the libraries - they're all almost exactly the same. Octave syntax is very similar to Matlab, it would probably literally run Matlab files with no modification. You have it with Gimp and Photoshop, Desktop Linuxes and Windows, MS Office and OpenOffice derivatives, and so on. The programming language used in Octave is C++ and it also allows the STL library, but the truth is that the syntax in which the applications are programmed and how the calculations are carried out is very similar to MATLAB, considered as the commercial equivalent of this application.Unfortunately it tends to be the case with many OSS projects that they forever drag behind as a cheap knock-off of some established, already working commercial product. To launch any instruction, Octave provides a command-line terminal that allows interactive and batch launching with ease. One of the applications it includes is gnuplot, a software application by means of which function graphics can be generated and that integrates perfectly with the development language proposed by Octave.

To do so, Octave includes some applications for this specific purpose. This software, that in reality is nothing more than a set of libraries to carry out calculations, and obtain numerical, graphical and simulation results that can later be analyzed.

From there on, its development has moved forward without stopping until it has become one of the best mathematics programs.

The first references of Octave date back to 1988 when people started thinking about it as a brilliant complement for a university book about chemical reactor designing.

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