[Eeglablist] EEGLAB test suite

[Arnaud Delorme]

Dear Yaroslav,


> * is there anyone interested/continuing the endeavor of Andreas in
>  making EEGLAB Octave-friendly?  Besides GUI aspect, upon quick
>  look I see that bulk of functionality in EEGLAB fails even syntax
>  compatibility due to excessive use of nested functions.  But, I guess,
>  if that aspect would be kept in mind for future EEGLAB developments it
>  could be easily made Octave compatible.  or may be there are more
>  severe issues?


We have not spent a lot of time trying to make EEGLAB Octave Friendly.
You may see this page though.

http://sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/EEGLAB_and_Octave

Basically, it requires tremendous amount of work to adapt EEGLAB graphics to Octave. You could use Octave for computation only but then you would still need Matlab to visualize your results (so why not use Matlab in the first place). For some unknown reasons, Octave has been stuck with using the limited functionality and flexibility of GNUplot for graphics (which has evolved since 1986 but just cannot compare to the extended graphics capabilities of Matlab which is based on Java or to the graphic capabilities most other free software for that matter). Nevertheless, it could still make sense to use Octave on clusters of computers and do visualization on a single workstation (avoiding the need to purchase multiple Matlab licenses). If someone is motivated to make part of the EEGLAB Octave compatible, we will open the code for him/her.


> * was Andreas' test suite (or parts of it) ever incorporated
>  anywhere else?


Andreas Romeyke and Maxim Duester from Germany worked extensively in 2007 on an EEGLAB test suite (a series of functions - or test cases - to test EEGLAB). However, Andreas does not support the web site https://svnserv.cbs.mpg.de/trac/eeglab any more and they discontinued their efforts in 2007. However, we recently (2010) dig out their old code and incorporated their testsuite with our own EEGLAB test functions. There are now more than 600 test functions thats test almost all functions of EEGLAB (it does not mean that these functions work in all cases but it is a guarantee that at least they work - or do not crash - in some cases). If someone is interested in helping to maintain or develop further EEGLAB test cases, please let us know. Unlike EEGLAB, test cases are not under currently under SVN but we could easily create a repository.

Arno