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I am looking for a way to access a matlab module from python. My current situation is this:

• I have a python code that does numerical computations by calling Lapack routines while the memory is allocated as ctypes and passed as pointers to the Lapack routines.
• I also have a matlab module, which is compatible with octave, that does some mathematical tricks I want to use.

My question now is this:
What is an efficient way to keep all the main work in python while at the same time exploit the possibilities that matlab/octave modules offer. Also it would be kind of nice, if my ctype arrays do not have to be converted into some other object in order to run octave. However, I can see that that last point is hard to accomplish. 

My current research shows me two possible options:

1. Pytave: However it seems that this packages is kind of pre alpha?!
2. Go this humpy road: ctypes -> *.mat file (via numpy) -> octave -> *.mat file -> ctypes (via numpy) 

You can use oct2py, which IIUC was started by its author because pytave didn't work on win32. It is successfully used in IPython through its octavemagic extension and I can tell it is easy to use on its own, the code is maintained (I reported a little Unicode bug and the author fixed it in a day) and works well. Most of the times is as simple as: 

 >>> from oct2py import octave
>>> octave.run("cos(pi / 3)")
'ans =  0.50000'
>>> octave.call("foo", a, b)  # Function in foo.m