Scilab is a scientific software package for numerical computations providing a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications. Developed since 1990 by researchers from INRIA and ENPC, it is now maintained and developed by Scilab Consortium since its creation in May 2003.

Scilab includes hundreds of mathematical functions with the possibility to add interactively programs from various languages (C, Fortran...). It has sophisticated data structures (including lists, polynomials, rational functions, linear systems...), an interpreter and a high level programming language.

Scilab has been designed to be an open system where the user can define new data types and operations on these data types by using overloading.

Features :
2-D and 3-D graphics, animation
Linear algebra, sparse matrices
Polynomials and rational functions
Simulation: ODE solver and DAE solver
Scicos: a hybrid dynamic systems modeler and simulator
Classic and robust control, LMI optimization
Differentiable and non-differentiable optimization
Signal processing
Metanet: graphs and networks
Parallel Scilab using PVM
Statistics
Interface with Computer Algebra: Maple package for Scilab code generation, MuPAD 3.0 includes Scilab
Interface with Tcl/Tk
And a large number of contributions for various domains.