Scilab: A Free Scientific Software Package

Scilab is a scientific software package for numerical computations providing a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications.

Scilab is an open source software. Since 1994 it has been distributed freely along with the source code via the Internet. It is currently used in educational and industrial environments around the world. Scilab is now the responsibility of the Scilab Consortium, launched in May 2003. There are currently 25 members in Scilab Consortium.

Scilab includes hundreds of mathematical functions with the possibility to add interactively programs from various languages (C, C++, Fortran…). It has sophisticated data structures (including lists, polynomials, rational functions, linear systems...), an interpreter and a high level programming language.

Scilab has been designed to be an open system where the user can define new data types and operations on these data types by using overloading.
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Scilab capabilities

A number of toolboxes are available with the system:

• 2-D and 3-D graphics, animation
• Linear algebra, sparse matrices
• Polynomials and rational functions
• Interpolation, approximation
• Simulation: ODE solver and DAE solver
• Scicos: a hybrid dynamic systems modeler and simulator
• Classic and robust control, LMI optimization
• Differentiable and non-differentiable optimization
• Signal processing
• Metanet: graphs and networks
• Parallel Scilab
• Statistics
• Interface with Computer Algebra: Maple package for Scilab code generation
• Interface with Fortran, Tcl/Tk, C, C++, Java, LabVIEW
• And a large number of contributions for various domains.

A large number of contributions can be downloaded from Scilab Web site. Scilab has been built using a number of external libraries.