High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command-line interface (CLI) for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with MATLAB. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language. As part of the GNU Project, it is free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).