I use this wonderful software for all my work. There are few people who prefer Scilab to Octave. But I prefer the latter. There are even tools associated with some of these programs for the conversion of code from Matlab. And many of them employ. simple parsers for this purpose.

Name:  GNU Octave For scientific computation.jpg
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shows a typical Octave window. You can get the latest copy of Octave (3,0.3). html or check your distribution's software repository for it. Another option is the Qt front-end.