adding Yarp Octave binding

[apaikan]

Using Yarp from Octave

Swig already supports Octave binding. Thus it is not a bad idea to have Yarp-Octave binding. I have tested some simple examples of using YARP within octave on Linux and it works fine.

The compilation is easy and fine. I have not tested everything in Octave but the Port/BufferedPort reading/writing works correctly.

[paulfitz]

Looks great, thanks @apaikan! One thing, could you mark the .m examples as being for octave, or we may have matlab users complaining about them not working. Either stick them in an "octave" subdirectory, or put a big clear warning at the start of the source?

[apaikan]

@paulfitz What about moving all binding example to the $YARP_ROOT/example/bindings under separate folders?. We can have something like:

$YARP_ROOT/example/bindings/perl/example.pl
$YARP_ROOT/example/bindings/python/example.py
$YARP_ROOT/example/bindings/rubby/example.rb
$YARP_ROOT/example/bindings/tcl/example.tcl
$YARP_ROOT/example/bindings/lisp/example.lisp
$YARP_ROOT/example/bindings/lua/example.lua
$YARP_ROOT/example/bindings/octave/example.m
...

we can even populate more useful examples for each language to clear tricky usage of some swig-bound functions. For example, yarp::os::Time::now() should be used in Lua as yarp.Time_now() while in Octave it should be called as yarp.Time.now().

[drdanz]

+1 for the patch and +1 for moving the examples (-1 for "rubby", even though I kind of like it, I'd stick for the real name "ruby" :-) ).
I think that the reason the examples are inside the bindings folder is because you can choose to build them from outside yarp (i.e. from the svn just download the bindings folder), but in my opinion it does no longer make sense, and I think we should remove this option, in order to simplify the build and the number of options... Is anyone using it?

[paulfitz]

All good points. Merging this as is so it doesn't get blocked and filed a separate issue for renovations #318.

[lornat75]

Related to bindings compilation, now bindings can compiled directly from yarp, but the documentation does not mention it. I think we should update the bindings instructions.