I'm porting some MATLAB functions to Scilab. The cool thing is that there is a conversion toolbox that make things very easy.
The problem is I did not find the counterpart to the syms function, and the symbolic toolbox in general. (I'd like a port of the Control System Toolbox too, amd I'm still searching for some functions I'd may need).
The only thing about symbolic toolbox I've found is this, but it was a little trcky and not so easy (actually I was not able to set up it correctly in 30 minutes, and I gave up for now. I'm going to try later), and it needs Maxima to be installed. Does anyone know anything about that?
Scilab is not exactly a must. The project aims to give a more free and open source alternative to MATLAB. I saw there is SymPy for Python, and I just could use it with SciPy, but I'd lost the conversion toolbox thing :\
That said, what should be better? Get SciLab and Maxima work together or move to Python & co.? This is the start of the project, so the earlier I choose this, the better.
See Bye MATLAB, hello Python, thanks Sage for a first-hand experience of migrating from MATLAB to Python.