## Introduction

The Octave-Forge Symbolic package adds symbolic calculation features to GNU Octave. It use SymPy under its hood, but no knowledge of Python is required.

I found in some way that the result of Octave symbolic package is more user-friendly than Matlab.

## Test

For example, you can test the following code in both applications to compare the results.

 1 2 3 4  % pkg load symbolic syms a1 a2 a3 m v0 t real vt = (-a2+sqrt(-a2^2+4*a1*a3)*tan((-sqrt(-a2^2+4*a1*a3)/m)*t/2 + atan((2*a1*v0+a2)/sqrt(-a2^2+4*a1*a3))))/(2*a1) xt = simplify(int(vt,t)) 

In Octave, the commented line ‘pkg load symbolic’ must be uncommented first to load the symbolic package.

## Results

Here it comes the output images of both applications.

Matlab shows:

As a comparison, Octave shows:

For Octave symbolic, the result formula is half rendered close to $\LaTeX$ or MathType. But Matlab only returns pure symbolic expression code which is just not that easy for human to read.

## Summary

Although Matlab is faster, but the plain text output is not friendly for me at least, so i will use Octave occasionally if needed.