textread() becomes part of Octave just as it's getting phased out in Matlab :)

textread() is a nice function that essentially takes an array of records (in a flat file) and turns it into a set of arrays. Basically you're performing a projection to get the set of time series you need from a time series of records.

I used to use Octave a lot instead of Matlab in grad school (computer vision) and still use it a good bit now translating/writing scripts for U-Hawaii's Oceanography program. viraptor is right, though, "ipython -pylab" is a great replacement, too

Python is where I keep going back to, for _everything_, because it has libraries for so much stuff, super-clean syntax, relatively easy integration with C, and enough extensibility.