Octave is a (mostly matlab (r) compatible) high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. it provides a convenient command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically.

this package provides the include files needed to compile and link user-supplied code with gnu octave. if you only write interpreted .m files, you do not need this package.

the package is architecture-specific as it contains machine-dependent compiler switches in the mkoctfile script.