[hules]

Well the licence fee of matlab is pretty massive (2500€ / user, and then each toolbox is 500 or 1000 euros each..), and then you have do deal with activation issues if you happen to switch computers quite often. Octave is a good alternative to run your matlab code if you don't need the "fancy" matlab ide.

The octave interpreter is slower than matlab, but that's because there is a JIT compiler in matlab. octave is still a good tool in my opinion.

[signaru]

The one thing I miss from Matlab's IDE is the ability to properly rename variables. Octave lacks this (not sure about this new release) and I so far haven't found a Matlab/Octave LSP that can be used for other code editors.

[tpoacher]

new = old; clear old;

Or if you're a gui person, right click on a variable in your workspace and click Rename