Re: [Matplotlib-users] Migration from Matlab: translator and EEGlab

[John H. <jd...@gm...>]

On 3/28/07, Giorgio F. Gilestro <gil...@gm...> wrote:
> Hi,
> I have to question that will help some colleagues/friends of mine to switch
> to python from matlab.
>
> 1 - is there an automatic translator of code from matlab to
> python/numpy/matplotlib? I believe it would be very easy to implement due
> the similar syntax between the two. I could do something similar myself but
> first I better make sure it doesn't exist yet.

None that I know of, and it probably wouldn't be easy.  For one thing,
matlab uses parentheses for function calls and indexing, and it is
probably not always obvious which is which for a translator.  One
could write something that got it mostly right and flagged
ambiguities, but I think you should expect that a human would have to
clean it up afterwards unless you attempt something ambitious and not
easy.  Prove me wrong!

> 2 - Is there a python/numpy/mpl equivalent of EEGlab? see:
> http://www.sccn.ucsd.edu/eeglab/

There is pbrain, which is not and does not attempt to be an equivalent
of EEGLab, but it is an EEG viewer/analysis package in python, which
uses matplotlib (and VTK).  It is specialized for spectral analysis,
but could be extended to do other things.

  http://neuroimaging.scipy.org/pbrain/

I first wrote an EEG analysis package in matlab, and after becoming
frustrated with the lack of good support for complex data structures,
networking, and programming paradigms, I jettisoned it for python and
wrote pbrain.  I wrote matplotlib in support of the pbrain
application, so some of the work has already been done :-)

JDH