Re: octave on windows 8

[Michael Goffioul]

On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Francis Poulin <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello,

I am teaching a course where I am encouraging my students to use Octave, instead of the more popular commercial alternative.  I have a student who told me that he installed it on his PC that runs windows 8 but it crashes every time there is an error in the code, which when learning a language happens a lot.  Unfortunately I don't have the details of what he installed.

Do you have any instructions on how to install octave 3.6.4 on windows 8 that avoids the crashes (that the student mentioned others have observed)?

Sorry to be vague but any advice would be helpful.

This is a known bug in gnulib, that is yet to be fixed. In summary, because of that bug, octave fails to detect stdin as being an interactive console and starts octave in non-interactive mode. In that mode, octave exits on error.

To work around the problem, you have to force interactive mode by using the command-line flags "-i --line-editing" to start octave, either by starting octave from a command prompt (where you can specify these flags), or by editing some shortcut properties.

Michael.