Scilab backend for Cantor is reviving

Back to 2011 I was a GSoC student at Scilab community. My project was to create a backend for Scilab in Cantor, the KDE mathematical software. My project ended very well and the objectives were accomplished. You can see several features of this project in reports from my blog.

The backend would be working with Scilab 5.4 because I implemented the standard streams support in Scilab. The backend was available in KDE 4.8, released in January 2012, but Scilab 5.4 was released in October 2012. Unfortunately, when this version of Scilab was released, the standard streams support were not working.

Since this date I tried some times fix it but I did not obtained success.

Therefore, Scilab release a 5.5-beta1 version in begin of this October and I did a test with Cantor and… voilá! The standard streams is working now and the Cantor backend is working too!

Now it is time to Scilab backend for Cantor revive! I am doing “nightly-builds” of Scilab to verify if the standard streams are working and I developed new features to the backend. Let me show them:

Predefined functions and variables

In the past Scilab backend had a giant-size XML file listing all predefined functions and variables. Now the backend run getscilabkeywords command to get this information, used in tab-complete and syntax highlighting.

Tab-Complete and Syntax Highlighting

These features were available in previous version of the backend to predefined functions and variables. Now user variables are too used in these features.

Tab-complete for predefined functions

Syntax highlighting and Tab-Complete for user variables

Syntax highlighting

Variable Management Panel

Scilab backend now have a preliminary variable management panel. All variable defined by user are showed in this panel.

Variable Management panel

With this feature the user can save and load variables, and clean the variable environment.

But it is a preliminary version based in Octave variable management: the user must define the variable presenting it (you can not use “;”). So the label and value will be send to panel.

Scilab backend reviving in KDE 4.12

I am working for this new version of Scilab backend in KDE 4.12.

But you can test it now: the code is hosted in scilab-backend branch from Cantor repository.