Many thanks to the authors at Inria who, through their willingness
to accept feedback, have helped me remove 39 patches!
Changes to scilab include (from scilab-2.5/CHANGES):
NEW FUNCTIONALITIES
===================
Global variables have been introduced
New graphic mode has been added to allow scrollbar handling (panner
for X Window and scrollbars for Windows).
GIF export format is now available for Scilab graphic windows.
Keyboard events and window closing within graphical windows can now be
captured.
Scicos graphical user interface has been made more intuitive and
keyboard shortcuts have been added.
Scilab Binary files created by "save" are now system-independent so
they can be exchanged. In particular (compiled macros) *.bin files and
*.cos (scicos diagrams) can be exchanged.
It is now possible to dynamically link C++ procedures with Scilab.
A new data type "mlist" has been added.
A new function "genlib" allows users to compile the .sci files in a
given directory, generate associated library and load it. This
function is particularly useful under windows if VC++ is not
available.
C formatted input output functions (printf, scanf, ..) have been
interfaced to scilab.
OTHERS IMPROVEMENTS
===================
Efficiency has been improved using reference argument passing when
possible instead of value passing.
Hypermatrix opreations have been accelerated.
On X Window systems 3D Athena Widgets are preferably used instead of
standard Athena Widgets for a better look.
The "Matlab 4" to Scilab translator has been completed and considerably
improved.
NEW TOOLBOXES
=============
True integer data types (1,2 and 4 bytes) with associated operations
and some functions acting on them have been added.
A library of procedures has been added to allow the use of Matlab
mex-files under Scilab.
PORTS
=====
Scilab has been successfully compiled with Windows ABSOFT development
environment.
INCOMPATIBILITIES
=================
New Scilab "save"d files cannot be loaded by earlier Scilab versions.
A new function "oldsave" has been added to save in old format.
Scilab help mechanism has changed. The $MANCHAPTERS/Chapter is no more
used, instead a Scilab variable "helps" is used.
This is from Dan McMahill (mcmahill@mtl.mit.edu) in PR pkg/6034.
scilab is a high level scientific math programming environment with
graphics.
[scilab is HUGE.]
The only major thing I changed was the way of creating the PLIST.
