Emacs 24.3.1 and Octave 3.8.1 Inferior Octave Hangs

With GNU Emacs 24.3.1 and GNU Octave, version 3.8.1 an attempt to execute a line of octave hangs, with the inferior octave buffer displaying the welcome text.

This is because they disagree on what the prompt should be:
Creating a ~/.octaverc with the line PS1(">> ") should fix this:

$ cat >~/.octaverc
PS1(">> ")