[Blindmath] initial review of Octave 4.0.0

[Godfrey, Jonathan]

Hi all.

Following the news that Octave had released a new version, I downloaded it immediately to see how much had changed.

I installed it using all the default settings; I'm using windows 7 on a 64 bit laptop, and I've tested using JAWS 17 and NVDA.

The download file was 179MB as compared to the previous version I installed in 2013 (v 3.6.4) which was a mere 69MB. Much of that additional 110MB seems to be the new GUI interface and a whole bunch of material from other open source projects, cygwin and other utilities that I can't evaluate in their own right.

The default installation puts two shortcuts on the desktop, one for the CLI and one for the GUI. The CLI client remains as accessible as it was under previous versions. The GUI however failed to interact with either JAWS or NVDA. Perhaps there is something that can be manipulated with sight to get an improved outcome, but that isn't good enough for me.

My biggest gripe at  present is that the command line I offered yesterday for running a job in batch mode is no longer valid. I will need to play around a bit to get it sorted so it won't feature here.

Jonathan