Professor DeBra is " Edward C Wells Prof. Em." in the department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at Stanford University.
In 1984-1986 I developed a course in automatic control using COMAL. I had developed an extensive set of procedures to use COMAL for dynamic analysis. There were 4 areas, vector and matrix operations like the original EISPACK and LINPACK (a collection of functions in FORTRAN that were for solving the eigenvalue/eigenvector problem); complex variable operations; rotation operations, that is the euler angles, direction cosine matrices and euler parameters and the procedures to go from one to another; and some graphics for plotting. I was using COMAL first on a Commodore 64 then an IBM AT.
Time moved on and MATLAB appeared, so it is unlikely I will return to the program development I went through to get all that good stuff running again. It's a pity, because I believe COMAL to be the best introductory language there is.
MatLAB -Editor's Note
MATLAB is a high-performance technical computing environment, combining comprehensive maths and graphics functions with a powerful high-level language. Full information about the MatLAB tools can be found on the MathWorks Inc website.
Edited 19-June-2001