title: Porting MATLAB functions to Scilab. How do I use symbolic?
body: <p>I'm porting some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATLAB" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MATLAB</a> functions to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilab" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Scilab</a>. The cool thing is that there is a <a href="http://ralyx.inria.fr/2004/Raweb/scilab/uid96.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">conversion toolbox</a> that make things very easy.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is I did not find the counterpart to the <strong>syms</strong> function, and the symbolic toolbox in general. (I'd like a port of the <em>Control System Toolbox</em> too, amd I'm still searching for some functions I'd may need).</p>
  
  <p>The only thing about symbolic toolbox I've found is <a href="http://www.cert.fr/dcsd/idco/perso/Magni/s_sym/doc/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a>, but it was a little trcky and not so easy (actually I was not able to set up it correctly in 30&nbsp;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?</p>
  
  <p>Scilab is not exactly a must. The project aims to give a more <em>free</em> and <em>open source</em> alternative to MATLAB. I saw there is <a href="http://code.google.com/p/sympy/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">SymPy</a> for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_%28programming_language%29" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Python</a>, and I just could use it with <a href="http://www.scipy.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">SciPy</a>, but I'd lost the <a href="http://ralyx.inria.fr/2004/Raweb/scilab/uid96.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">conversion toolbox</a> thing :\</p>
  
  <p>That said, what should be better? Get SciLab and Maxima work together or move to Python &amp; co.? This is the start of the project, so the earlier I choose this, the better.</p>