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Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.8:
--------------------------------------------------------- ** One of the biggest new features for Octave 3.8 is a graphical user interface. It is the one thing that users have requested most often over the last few years and now it is almost ready. But because it is not quite as polished as we would like, we have decided to wait until the 4.0.x release series before making the GUI the default interface (until then, you can use the --force-gui option to start the GUI). Given the length of time and the number of bug fixes and improvements since the last major release Octave, we also decided against delaying the release of all these new improvements any longer just to perfect the GUI. So please enjoy the 3.8 release of Octave and the preview of the new GUI. We believe it is working reasonably well, but we also know that there are some obvious rough spots and many things that could be improved. WE NEED YOUR HELP. There are many ways that you can help us fix the remaining problems, complete the GUI, and improve the overall user experience for both novices and experts alike: * If you are a skilled software developer, you can help by contributing your time to help with Octave's development. See http://octave.org/get-involved.html for more information. * If Octave does not work properly, you are encouraged report the problems you find. See http://octave.org/bugs.html for more information about how to report problems. * Whether you are a user or developer, you can help to fund the project. Octave development takes a lot of time and expertise. Your contributions help to ensure that Octave will continue to improve. See http://octave.org/donate.html for more details. We hope you find Octave to be useful. Please help us make it even better for the future! ** Octave now uses OpenGL graphics by default with FLTK widgets. If OpenGL libraries or FLTK widgets are not available when Octave is built, gnuplot is used. You may also choose to use gnuplot for graphics by executing the command graphics_toolkit ("gnuplot") Adding this command to your ~/.octaverc file will set the default for each session. ** Printing or saving figures with OpenGL graphics requires the gl2ps library which is no longer distributed with Octave. The software is widely available in most package managers. If a pre-compiled package does not exist for your system, you can find the current sources at http://www.geuz.org/gl2ps/. ** Octave now supports nested functions with scoping rules that are compatible with Matlab. A nested function is one declared and defined within the body of another function. The nested function is only accessible from within the enclosing function which makes it one method for making private functions whose names do not conflict with those in the global namespace (See also subfunctions and private functions). In addition, variables in the enclosing function are visible within the nested function. This makes it possible to have a pseudo-global variable which can be seen by a group of functions, but which is not visible in the global namespace. Example: function outerfunc (...) ... function nested1 (...) ... function nested2 (...) ... endfunction endfunction function nested3 (...) ... endfunction endfunction ** Line continuations inside character strings have changed. The sequence '...' is no longer recognized as a line continuation inside a character string. A backslash '\' followed by a newline character is no longer recognized as a line continuation inside single-quoted character strings. Inside double-quoted character strings, a backslash followed by a newline character is still recognized as a line continuation, but the backslash character must be followed *immediately* by the newline character. No whitespace or end-of-line comment may appear between them. ** Backslash as a continuation marker outside of double-quoted strings is now deprecated. Using '\' as a continuation marker outside of double quoted strings is now deprecated and will be removed from a future version of Octave. When that is done, the behavior of (a \ b) will be consistent with other binary operators. ** Redundant terminal comma accepted by parser A redundant terminal comma is now accepted in matrix definitions which allows writing code such as [a,... b,... c,... ] = deal (1,2,3) ** Octave now has limited support for named exceptions The following syntax is now accepted: try statements catch exception-id statements end The exception-id is a structure with the fields "message" and "identifier". For example try error ("Octave:error-id", "error message"); catch myerr printf ("identifier: %s\n", myerr.identifier); printf ("message: %s\n", myerr.message); end_try_catch When classdef-style classes are added to Octave, the exception-id will become an MException object. ** Warning states may now be set temporarily, until the end of the current function, using the syntax warning STATE ID "local" in which STATE may be "on", "off", or "error". Changes to warning states that are set locally affect the current function and all functions called from the current scope. The previous warning state is restored on return from the current function. The "local" option is ignored if used in the top-level workspace. ** Warning IDs renamed: Octave:array-as-scalar => Octave:array-to-scalar Octave:array-as-vector => Octave:array-to-vector ** 'emptymatch', 'noemptymatch' options added to regular expressions. With this addition Octave now accepts the entire set of Matlab options for regular expressions. 'noemptymatch' is the default, but 'emptymatch' has certain uses where you need to match an assertion rather than actual characters. For example, regexprep ('World', '^', 'Hello ', 'emptymatch') => Hello World where the pattern is actually the assertion '^' or start-of-line. ** For compatibility with Matlab, the regexp, regexpi, and regexprep functions now process backslash escape sequences in single-quoted pattern strings. In addition, the regexprep function now processes backslash escapes in single-quoted replacement strings. For example, regexprep (str, '\t', '\n') would search the variable str for a TAB character (escape sequence \t) and replace it with a NEWLINE (escape sequence \n). Previously the expression would have searched for a literal '\' followed by 't' and replaced the two characters with the sequence '\', 'n'. ** A TeX parser has been implemented for the FLTK toolkit and is the default for any text object including titles and axis labels. The TeX parser is supported only for display on a monitor, not for printing. A quick summary of features: Code Feature Example Comment ----------------------------------------------------------------- _ subscript H_2O formula for water ^ exponent y=x^2 formula for parabola \char symbol \beta Greek symbol beta \fontname font \fontname{Arial} set Arial font \fontsize fontsize \fontsize{16} set fontsize 16 \color[rgb] fontcolor \color[rgb]{1 0 1} set magenta color \bf bold \bfBold Text bold font \it italic \itItalic Text italic font \sl slanted \slOblique Text slanted font \rm normal \bfBold\rmNormal normal font {} group {\bf Bold}Normal group objects e^{i*\pi} = -1 group objects ** The m-files in the plot directory have been overhauled. The plot functions now produce output that is nearly visually compatible with Matlab. Plot performance has also increased, dramatically for some functions such as comet and waitbar. Finally, the documentation for most functions has been updated so it should be clearer both how to use a function and when a function is appropriate. ** The m-files in the image directory have been overhauled. The principal benefit is that Octave will now no longer automatically convert images stored with integers to doubles. Storing images as uint8 or uint16 requires only 1/8 or 1/4 the memory of an image stored using doubles. For certain operations, such as fft2, the image must still be converted to double in order to work. Other changes include fixes to the way indexed images are read from a colormap depending on the image class (integer images have a -1 offset to the colormap row number). ** The imread and imwrite functions have been completely rewritten. The main changes relate to the alpha channel, support for reading and writing of floating point images, implemented writing of indexed images, and appending images to multipage image files. The issues that may arise due to backwards incompatibility are: * imwrite no longer interprets a length of 2 or 4 in the third dimension as grayscale or RGB with alpha channel (a length of 4 will be saved as a CMYK image). Alpha channel must be passed as separate argument. * imread will always return the colormap indexes when reading an indexed image, even if the colormap is not requested as output. * transparency values are now inverted from previous Octave versions (0 is for completely transparent instead of completely opaque). In addition, the function imformats has been implemented to expand reading and writing of images of different formats through imread and imwrite. ** The colormap function now provides new options--"list", "register", and "unregister"--to list all available colormap functions, and to add or remove a function name from the list of known colormap functions. Packages that implement extra colormaps should use these commands with PKG_ADD and PKG_DEL statements. ** strsplit has been modified to be compatible with Matlab. There are two instances where backward compatibility is broken. (1) Delimiters are now string vectors, not scalars. Octave's legacy behavior strsplit ("1 2, 3", ", ") ans = { [1,1] = 1 [1,2] = 2 [1,3] = [1,4] = 3 } Matlab compatible behavior strsplit ("1 2, 3", ", ") ans = { [1,1] = 1 2 [1,2] = 3 } (2) By default, Matlab treats consecutive delimiters as a single delimiter. By default, Octave's legacy behavior was to return an empty string for the part between the delmiters. Where legacy behavior is desired, the call to strsplit() may be replaced by ostrsplit(), which is Octave's original implementation of strsplit(). ** The datevec function has been extended for better Matlab compatibility. It now accepts string inputs in the following numerical formats: 12, 21, 22, 26, 29, 31. This is undocumented, but verifiable, Matlab behavior. In addition, the default for formats which do not specify a date is January 1st of the current year. The previous default was the current day, month, and year. This may produce changes in existing scripts. ** The error function and its derivatives has been extended to accept complex arguments. The following functions now accept complex inputs: erf erfc erfcx In addition two new error functions erfi (imaginary error function) and dawson (scaled imaginary error function) have been added. ** The glpk function has been modified to reflect changes in the GLPK library. The "round" and "itcnt" options have been removed. The "relax" option has been replaced by the "rtest" option. The numeric values of error codes and of some options have also changed. ** The kurtosis function has changed definition to be compatible with Matlab. It now returns the base kurtosis instead of the "excess kurtosis". The old behavior can be had by changing scripts to normalize with -3. "excess kurtosis" = kurtosis (x) - 3 ** The moment function has changed definition to be compatible with Matlab. It now returns the central moment instead of the raw moment. The old behavior can be had by passing the type argument "r" for raw. ** The default name of the Octave crash dump file is now "octave-workspace" instead of "octave-core". The exact name can always be customized with the octave_core_file_name function. ** A citation command has been added to display information on how to cite Octave and packages in publications. The package system will look for and install CITATION files from packages. ** The java package from Octave Forge is now part of core Octave. The following new functions are available for interacting with Java directly from Octave: debug_java java_matrix_autoconversion isjava java_unsigned_autoconversion java2mat javaaddpath javaArray javaclasspath javaMethod javamem javaObject javarmpath usejava In addition, the following functions that use the Java interface are now available (provided that Octave is compiled with support for Java enabled): helpdlg listdlg questdlg inputdlg msgbox warndlg ** Other new functions added in 3.8.0: atan2d erfi lines base64_decode expint linsolve base64_encode findfigs missing_component_hook betaincinv flintmax polyeig built_in_docstrings_file fminsearch prefdir cmpermute gallery preferences cmunique gco readline_re_read_init_file colorcube hdl2struct readline_read_init_file copyobj history_save rgbplot dawson imformats save_default_options dblist importdata shrinkfaces desktop isaxes splinefit doc_cache_create iscolormap stemleaf ellipj isequaln strjoin ellipke jit_debug struct2hdl erfcinv jit_enable tetramesh jit_startcnt waterfall ** Deprecated functions. The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.4 and have been removed from Octave 3.8. autocor dispatch is_global setstr autocov fstat krylovb strerror betai gammai perror values cellidx glpkmex replot cquad is_duplicate_entry saveimage The following functions have been deprecated in Octave 3.8 and will be removed from Octave 3.12 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.8): default_save_options java_new gen_doc_cache java_set interp1q java_unsigned_conversion isequalwithequalnans javafields java_convert_matrix javamethods java_debug re_read_readline_init_file java_get read_readline_init_file java_invoke saving_history The following keywords have been deprecated in Octave 3.8 and will be removed from Octave 3.12 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.8): static The following configuration variables have been deprecated in Octave 3.8 and will be removed from Octave 3.12 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.8): CC_VERSION (now GCC_VERSION) CXX_VERSION (now GXX_VERSION) The internal class <Octave_map> has been deprecated in Octave 3.8 and will be removed from Octave 3.12 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.8). Replacement classes are <octave_map> (struct array) or <octave_scalar_map> for a single structure. Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.6: --------------------------------------------------------- ** The PCRE library is now required to build Octave. If a pre-compiled package does not exist for your system, you can find PCRE sources at http://www.pcre.org ** The ARPACK library is no longer distributed with Octave. If you need the eigs or svds functions you must provide an external ARPACK through a package manager or by compiling it yourself. If a pre-compiled package does not exist for your system, you can find the current ARPACK sources at http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/arpack-ng ** Many of Octave's binary operators (.*, .^, +, -, ...) now perform automatic broadcasting for array operations which allows you to use operator notation instead of calling bsxfun or expanding arrays (and unnecessarily wasting memory) with repmat or similar idioms. For example, to scale the columns of a matrix by the elements of a row vector, you may now write rv .* M In this expression, the number of elements of rv must match the number of columns of M. The following operators are affected: plus + .+ minus - .- times .* rdivide ./ ldivide .\ power .^ .** lt < le <= eq == gt > ge >= ne != ~= and & or | atan2 hypot max min mod rem xor additionally, since the A op= B assignment operators are equivalent to A = A op B, the following operators are also affected: += -= .+= .-= .*= ./= .\= .^= .**= &= |= See the "Broadcasting" section in the new "Vectorization and Faster Code Execution" chapter of the manual for more details. ** Octave now features a profiler, thanks to the work of Daniel Kraft under the Google Summer of Code mentorship program. The manual has been updated to reflect this addition. The new user-visible functions are profile, profshow, and profexplore. ** Overhaul of statistical distribution functions Functions now return "single" outputs for inputs of class "single". 75% reduction in memory usage through use of logical indexing. Random sample functions now use the same syntax as rand and accept a comma separated list of dimensions or a dimension vector. Functions have been made Matlab-compatible with regard to special cases (probability on boundaries, probabilities for values outside distribution, etc.). This may cause subtle changes to existing scripts. negative binomial function has been extended to real, non-integer inputs. The discrete_inv function now returns v(1) for 0 instead of NaN. The nbincdf function has been recoded to use a closed form solution with betainc. ** strread, textscan, and textread have been completely revamped. They now support nearly all Matlab functionality including: * Matlab-compatible whitespace and delimiter defaults * Matlab-compatible options: 'whitespace', treatasempty', format string repeat count, user-specified comment style, uneven-length output arrays, %n and %u conversion specifiers (provisionally) ** All .m string functions have been modified for better performance or greater Matlab compatibility. Performance gains of 15X-30X have been demonstrated. Operations on cell array of strings no longer pay quite as high a penalty as those on 2-D character arrays. deblank: Now requires character or cellstr input. strtrim: Now requires character or cellstr input. No longer trims nulls ("\0") from string for Matlab compatibility. strmatch: Follows documentation precisely and ignores trailing spaces in pattern and in string. Note that this is documented Matlab behavior but the implementation apparently does not always follow it. substr: Now possible to specify a negative LEN option which extracts to within LEN of the end of the string. strtok: Now accepts cellstr input. base2dec, bin2dec, hex2dec: Now accept cellstr inputs. dec2base, dec2bin, dec2hex: Now accept cellstr inputs. index, rindex: Now accept 2-D character array input. strsplit: Now accepts 2-D character array input. ** Geometry functions derived from Qhull (convhull, delaunay, voronoi) have been revamped. The options passed to the underlying qhull command have been changed for better results or for Matlab compatibility. convhull: Default options are "Qt" for 2D, 3D, 4D inputs Default options are "Qt Qx" for 5D and higher delaunay: Default options are "Qt Qbb Qc Qz" for 2D and 3D inputs Default options are "Qt Qbb Qc Qx" for 4D and higher voronoi: No default arguments ** Date/Time functions updated. Millisecond support with FFF format string now supported. datestr: Numerical formats 21, 22, 29 changed to match Matlab. Now accepts cellstr input. ** The following warning IDs have been removed: Octave:associativity-change Octave:complex-cmp-ops Octave:empty-list-elements Octave:fortran-indexing Octave:precedence-change ** The warning ID Octave:string-concat has been renamed to Octave:mixed-string-concat. ** Octave now includes the following Matlab-compatible preference functions: addpref getpref ispref rmpref setpref ** The following Matlab-compatible handle graphics functions have been added: guidata uipanel uitoolbar guihandles uipushtool uiwait uicontextmenu uiresume waitfor uicontrol uitoggletool The uiXXX functions above are experimental. Except for uiwait and uiresume, the uiXXX functions are not supported with the FLTK+OpenGL graphics toolkit. The gnuplot graphics toolkit does not support any of the uiXXX functions nor the waitfor function. ** New keyword parfor (parallel for loop) is now recognized as a valid keyword. Implementation, however, is still mapped to an ordinary for loop. ** Other new functions added in 3.6.0: bicg nthargout usejava is_dq_string narginchk waitbar is_sq_string python zscore is_function_handle register_graphics_toolkit loaded_graphics_toolkits recycle ** Deprecated functions. The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.2 and have been removed from Octave 3.6. create_set spcholinv splu dmult spcumprod spmax iscommand spcumsum spmin israwcommand spdet spprod lchol spdiag spqr loadimage spfind spsum mark_as_command sphcat spsumsq mark_as_rawcommand spinv spvcat spatan2 spkron str2mat spchol splchol unmark_command spchol2inv split unmark_rawcommand The following functions have been deprecated in Octave 3.6 and will be removed from Octave 3.10 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.6): cut is_duplicate_entry cor polyderiv corrcoef shell_cmd __error_text__ studentize error_text sylvester_matrix ** The following functions have been modified for Matlab compatibility: randperm Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.4.3: ----------------------------------------------------------- ** Octave 3.4.3 is a bug fixing release. Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.4.2: ----------------------------------------------------------- ** Octave 3.4.2 fixes some minor installation problems that affected version 3.4.1. Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.4.1: ----------------------------------------------------------- ** Octave 3.4.1 is primarily a bug fixing release. ** IMPORTANT note about binary incompatibility in this release: Binary compatibility for all 3.4.x releases was originally planned, but this is impossible for the 3.4.1 release due to a bug in the way shared libraries were built in Octave 3.4.0. Because of this bug, .oct files built for Octave 3.4.0 must be recompiled before they will work with Octave 3.4.1. Given that there would be binary incompatibilities with shared libraries going from Octave 3.4.0 to 3.4.1, the following incompatible changes were also made in this release: * The Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library is now required to build Octave. * Octave's libraries and .oct files are now installed in subdirectories of $libdir instead of $libexecdir. Any future Octave 3.4.x release versions should remain binary compatible with Octave 3.4.1 as proper library versioning is now being used as recommended by the libtool manual. ** The following functions have been deprecated in Octave 3.4.1 and will be removed from Octave 3.8 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.4): cquad is_duplicate_entry perror strerror ** The following functions are new in 3.4.1: colstyle gmres iscolumn isrow mgorth nproc rectangle ** The get_forge_pkg function is now private. ** The rectangle_lw, rectangle_sw, triangle_lw, and triangle_sw functions are now private. ** The logistic_regression_derivatives and logistic_regression_likelihood functions are now private. ** ChangeLog files in the Octave sources are no longer maintained by hand. Instead, there is a single ChangeLog file generated from the Mercurial version control commit messages. Older ChangeLog information can be found in the etc/OLD-ChangeLogs directory in the source distribution. Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.4: --------------------------------------------------------- ** BLAS and LAPACK libraries are now required to build Octave. The subset of the reference BLAS and LAPACK libraries has been removed from the Octave sources. ** The ARPACK library is now distributed with Octave so it no longer needs to be available as an external dependency when building Octave. ** The `lookup' function was extended to be more useful for general-purpose binary searching. Using this improvement, the ismember function was rewritten for significantly better performance. ** Real, integer and logical matrices, when used in indexing, will now cache the internal index_vector value (zero-based indices) when successfully used as indices, eliminating the conversion penalty for subsequent indexing by the same matrix. In particular, this means it is no longer needed to avoid repeated indexing by logical arrays using find for performance reasons. ** Logical matrices are now treated more efficiently when used as indices. Octave will keep the index as a logical mask unless the ratio of true elements is small enough, using a specialized code. Previously, all logical matrices were always first converted to index vectors. This results in savings in both memory and computing time. ** The `sub2ind' and `ind2sub' functions were reimplemented as compiled functions for better performance. These functions are now faster, can deliver more economized results for ranges, and can reuse the index cache mechanism described in previous paragraph. ** The built-in function equivalents to associative operators (`plus', `times', `mtimes', `and', and `or') have been extended to accept multiple arguments. This is especially useful for summing (multiplying, etc.) lists of objects (of possibly distinct types): matrix_sum = plus (matrix_list{:}); ** An FTP object type based on libcurl has been implemented. These objects allow ftp connections, downloads and uploads to be managed. For example, fp = ftp ("ftp.octave.org); cd (fp, "gnu/octave"); mget (fp, "octave-3.2.3.tar.bz2"); close (fp); ** The default behavior of `assert (observed, expected)' has been relaxed to employ less strict checking that does not require the internals of the values to match. This avoids previously valid tests from breaking due to new internal classes introduced in future Octave versions. For instance, all of these assertions were true in Octave 3.0.x but false in 3.2.x due to new optimizations and improvements: assert (2*linspace (1, 5, 5), 2*(1:5)) assert (zeros (0, 0), []) assert (2*ones (1, 5), (2) (ones (1,5))) ** The behavior of library functions `ismatrix', `issquare', and `issymmetric' has been changed for better consistency. * The `ismatrix' function now returns true for all numeric, logical and character 2-D or N-D matrices. Previously, `ismatrix' returned false if the first or second dimension was zero. Hence, `ismatrix ([])' was false, while `ismatrix (zeros (1,2,0))' was true. * The `issquare' function now returns a logical scalar, and is equivalent to the expression ismatrix (x) && ndims (x) == 2 && rows (x) == columns (x) The dimension is no longer returned. As a result, `issquare ([])' now yields true. * The `issymmetric' function now checks for symmetry instead of Hermitianness. For the latter, ishermitian was created. Also, logical scalar is returned rather than the dimension, so `issymmetric ([])' is now true. ** Function handles are now aware of overloaded functions. If a function is overloaded, the handle determines at the time of its reference which function to call. A non-overloaded version does not need to exist. ** Overloading functions for built-in classes (double, int8, cell, etc.) is now compatible with Matlab. ** Function handles can now be compared with the == and != operators, as well as the `isequal' function. ** Performance of concatenation (using []) and the functions `cat', `horzcat', and `vertcat' has been improved for multidimensional arrays. ** The operation-assignment operators +=, -=, *= and /= now behave more efficiently in certain cases. For instance, if M is a matrix and S a scalar, then the statement M += S; will operate on M's data in-place if it is not shared by another variable, usually increasing both time and memory efficiency. Only selected common combinations are affected, namely: matrix += matrix matrix -= matrix matrix .*= matrix matrix ./= matrix matrix += scalar matrix -= scalar matrix *= scalar matrix /= scalar logical matrix |= logical matrix logical matrix &= logical matrix where matrix and scalar belong to the same class. The left-hand side must be a simple variable reference. Moreover, when unary operators occur in expressions, Octave will also try to do the operation in-place if it's argument is a temporary expression. ** The effect of comparison operators (<, >, <=, and >=) applied to complex numbers has changed to be consistent with the strict ordering defined by the `max', `min', and `sort' functions. More specifically, complex numbers are compared by lexicographical comparison of the pairs `[abs(z), arg(z)]'. Previously, only real parts were compared; this can be trivially achieved by converting the operands to real values with the `real' function. ** The automatic simplification of complex computation results has changed. Octave will now simplify any complex number with a zero imaginary part or any complex matrix with all elements having zero imaginary part to a real value. Previously, this was done only for positive zeros. Note that the behavior of the complex function is unchanged and it still produces a complex value even if the imaginary part is zero. ** As a side effect of code refactoring in liboctave, the binary logical operations are now more easily amenable to compiler optimizations and are thus significantly faster. ** Octave now allows user-defined `subsasgn' methods to optimize out redundant copies. For more information, see the manual. ** More efficient matrix division handling. Octave is now able to handle the expressions M' \ V M.' \ V V / M (M is a matrix and V is a vector) more efficiently in certain cases. In particular, if M is triangular, all three expressions will be handled by a single call to xTRTRS (from LAPACK), with appropriate flags. Previously, all three expressions required a physical transpose of M. ** More efficient handling of certain mixed real-complex matrix operations. For instance, if RM is a real matrix and CM a complex matrix, RM * CM can now be evaluated either as complex (RM * real (CM), RM * imag (CM)) or as complex (RM) * CM, depending on the dimensions. The first form requires more temporaries and copying, but halves the FLOP count, which normally brings better performance if RM has enough rows. Previously, the second form was always used. Matrix division is similarly affected. ** More efficient handling of triangular matrix factors returned from factorizations. The functions for computing QR, LU and Cholesky factorizations will now automatically return the triangular matrix factors with proper internal matrix_type set, so that it won't need to be computed when the matrix is used for division. ** The built-in `sum' function now handles the non-native summation (i.e., double precision sum of single or integer inputs) more efficiently, avoiding a temporary conversion of the whole input array to doubles. Further, `sum' can now accept an extra option argument, using a compensated summation algorithm rather than a straightforward sum, which significantly improves precision if lots of cancellation occurs in the summation. ** The built-in `bsxfun' function now uses optimized code for certain cases where built-in operator handles are passed in. Namely, the optimizations concern the operators `plus', `minus', `times', `ldivide', `rdivide', `power', `and', `or' (for logical arrays), the relational operators `eq', `ne', `lt', `le', `gt', `ge', and the functions `min' and `max'. Optimizations only apply when both operands are of the same built-in class. Mixed real/complex and single/double operations will first convert both operands to a common type. ** The `strfind' and `strrep' functions now have compiled implementations, facilitating significantly more efficient searching and replacing in strings, especially with longer patterns. The code of `strcat' has been vectorized and is now much more efficient when many strings are concatenated. The `strcmpi' and `strncmpi' functions are now built-in functions, providing better performance. ** 'str2double' now has a compiled implementation and the API conforms to Matlab. The additional Octave-specific features of returning a boolean matrix indicating which elements were successfully converted has been removed. ** Matlab-style ignoring input and output function arguments using tilde (~) is now supported. Ignored output arguments may be detected from a function using the built-in function `isargout'. For more details, consult the manual. ** The list datatype, deprecated since the introduction of cells, has been removed. ** The accumarray function has been optimized and is now significantly faster in certain important cases. ** The behavior of isreal and isnumeric functions was changed to be more Matlab-compatible. ** The integer math & conversion warnings (Octave:int-convert-nan, Octave:int-convert-non-int-val, Octave:int-convert-overflow, Octave:int-math-overflow) have been removed. ** rem and mod are now built-in functions. They also handle integer types efficiently using integer arithmetic. ** Sparse indexing and indexed assignment has been mostly rewritten. Since Octave uses compressed column storage for sparse matrices, major attention is devoted to operations manipulating whole columns. Such operations are now significantly faster, as well as some other important cases. Further, it is now possible to pre-allocate a sparse matrix and subsequently fill it by assignments, provided they meet certain conditions. For more information, consult the `spalloc' function, which is no longer a mere dummy. Consequently, nzmax and nnz are no longer always equal in Octave. Octave may also produce a matrix with nnz < nzmax as a result of other operations, so you should consistently use nnz unless you really want to use nzmax (i.e., the space allocated for nonzero elements). Sparse concatenation is also affected, and concatenating sparse matrices, especially larger collections, is now significantly more efficient. This applies to both the [] operator and the cat/vertcat/horzcat functions. ** It is now possible to optionally employ the xGESDD LAPACK drivers for computing the singular value decomposition using svd, instead of the default xGESVD, using the configuration pseudo-variable svd_driver. The xGESDD driver can be up to 6x times faster when singular vectors are requested, but is reported to be somewhat less robust on highly ill-conditioned matrices. ** Configuration pseudo-variables, such as page_screen_output or confirm_recursive_rmdir (or the above mentioned svd_driver), now accept a "local" option as second argument, requesting the change to be undone when the current function returns: function [status, msg] = rm_rf (dir) confirm_recursive_rmdir (false, "local"); [status, msg] = rmdir (dir, "s"); ... endfunction Upon return, confirm_recursive_rmdir will be restored to the value it had on entry to the function, even if there were subsequent changes to the variable in function rm_rf or any of the functions it calls. ** pkg now accepts a -forge option for downloading and installing packages from Octave Forge automatically. For example, pkg install -forge general will automatically download the latest release of the general package and attempt to install it. No automatic resolving of dependencies is provided. Further, pkg list -forge can be used to list all available packages. ** The internal data representation of structs has been completely rewritten to make certain optimizations feasible. The field data can now be shared between structs with equal keys but different dimensions or values, making operations that preserve the fields faster. Economized storage is now used for scalar structs (just like most other scalars), making their usage more memory-efficient. Certain array-like operations on structs (concatenation, uniform cellfun, num2cell) have gained a significant speed-up. Additionally, the octave_scalar_map class now provides a simpler interface to work with scalar structs within a C++ DLD function. ** Two new formats are available for displaying numbers: format short eng format long eng Both display numbers in engineering notation, i.e., mantissa + exponent where the exponent is a multiple of 3. ** The following functions are new in Octave 3.4: accumdim erfcx nfields pqpnonneg uigetdir bitpack fileread nth_element quadcc uigetfile bitunpack fminbnd onCleanup randi uiputfile blkmm fskipl pbaspect repelems uimenu cbrt ifelse pie3 reset whitebg curl ishermitian powerset rsf2csf chop isindex ppder saveas daspect luupdate ppint strread divergence merge ppjumps textread ** Using the image function to view images with external programs such as display, xv, and xloadimage is no longer supported. The image_viewer function has also been removed. ** The behavior of struct assignments to non-struct values has been changed. Previously, it was possible to overwrite an arbitrary value: a = 1; a.x = 2; This is no longer possible unless a is an empty matrix or cell array. ** The dlmread function has been extended to allow specifying a custom value for empty fields. ** The dlmread and dlmwrite functions have been modified to accept file IDs (as returned by fopen) in addition to file names. ** Octave can now optimize away the interpreter overhead of an anonymous function handle, if the function simply calls another function or handle with some of its parameters bound to certain values. Example: f = @(x) sum (x, 1); When f is called, the call is forwarded to @sum with the constant 1 appended, and the anonymous function call does not occur on the call stack. ** For compatibility with Matlab, mu2lin (x) is now equivalent to mu2lin (x, 0). ** The new function `history_control' may be used to control the way command lines are added to the history list when Octave is using readline for command-line editing. For example history_control ("ignoredups") tells Octave to avoid adding duplicate lines to the history list. ** Octave now uses the gnulib library for improved portability and to avoid bugs in operating system functions. ** Deprecated functions. The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.0 and have been removed from Octave 3.4. beta_cdf geometric_pdf pascal_pdf beta_inv geometric_rnd pascal_rnd beta_pdf hypergeometric_cdf poisson_cdf beta_rnd hypergeometric_inv poisson_inv binomial_cdf hypergeometric_pdf poisson_pdf binomial_inv hypergeometric_rnd poisson_rnd binomial_pdf intersection polyinteg binomial_rnd is_bool setstr chisquare_cdf is_complex struct_contains chisquare_inv is_list struct_elements chisquare_pdf is_matrix t_cdf chisquare_rnd is_scalar t_inv clearplot is_square t_pdf clg is_stream t_rnd com2str is_struct uniform_cdf exponential_cdf is_symmetric uniform_inv exponential_inv is_vector uniform_pdf exponential_pdf isstr uniform_rnd exponential_rnd lognormal_cdf weibcdf f_cdf lognormal_inv weibinv f_inv lognormal_pdf weibpdf f_pdf lognormal_rnd weibrnd f_rnd meshdom weibull_cdf gamma_cdf normal_cdf weibull_inv gamma_inv normal_inv weibull_pdf gamma_pdf normal_pdf weibull_rnd gamma_rnd normal_rnd wiener_rnd geometric_cdf pascal_cdf geometric_inv pascal_inv The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.2 and will be removed from Octave 3.6 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.2): create_set spcholinv splu dmult spcumprod spmax iscommand spcumsum spmin israwcommand spdet spprod lchol spdiag spqr loadimage spfind spsum mark_as_command sphcat spsumsq mark_as_rawcommand spinv spvcat spatan2 spkron str2mat spchol splchol unmark_command spchol2inv split unmark_rawcommand The following functions have been deprecated in Octave 3.4 and will be removed from Octave 3.8 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.4): autocor cellidx gammai is_global replot values autocov dispatch glpkmex krylovb saveimage betai fstat intwarning perror strerror Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.2: --------------------------------------------------------- ** Compatibility with Matlab graphics has been improved. The hggroup object and associated listener callback functions have been added allowing the inclusion of group objects. Data sources have been added to these group objects such that x = 0:0.1:10; y = sin (x); plot (x, y, "ydatasource", "y"); for i = 1 : 100 pause(0.1) y = sin (x + 0.1 * i); refreshdata (); endfor works as expected. This capability has be used to introduce stem-series, bar-series, etc., objects for better Matlab compatibility. ** New graphics functions: addlistener ezcontour gcbo refresh addproperty ezcontourf ginput refreshdata allchild ezmesh gtext specular available_graphics_toolkits ezmeshc intwarning surfl graphics_toolkit ezplot ishghandle trisurf cla ezplot3 isocolors waitforbuttonpress clabel ezpolar isonormals comet ezsurf isosurface dellistener findall linkprop diffuse gcbf plotmatrix ** New experimental OpenGL/FLTK based plotting system. An experimental plotting system based on OpenGL and the FLTK toolkit is now part of Octave. This graphics toolkit is disabled by default. You can switch to using it with the command graphics_toolkit ("fltk") for all future figures or for a particular figure with the command graphics_toolkit (h, "fltk") where "h" is a valid figure handle. ** Functions providing direct access to gnuplot have been removed. The functions __gnuplot_plot__, __gnuplot_set__, __gnuplot_raw__, __gnuplot_show__, __gnuplot_replot__, __gnuplot_splot__, __gnuplot_save_data__ and __gnuplot_send_inline_data__ have been removed from Octave. These function were incompatible with the high level graphics handle code. ** The Control, Finance and Quaternion functions have been removed. These functions are now available as separate packages from http://octave.sourceforge.net/packages.html and can be reinstalled using the Octave package manager (see the pkg function). ** Specific sparse matrix functions removed. The following functions, which handled only sparse matrices have been removed. Instead of calling these functions directly, you should use the corresponding function without the "sp" prefix. spatan2 spcumsum spkron spprod spchol spdet splchol spqr spchol2inv spdiag splu spsum spcholinv spfind spmax spsumsqk spcumprod spinv spmin ** Improvements to the debugger. The interactive debugging features have been improved. Stopping on statements with dbstop should work correctly now. Stepping into and over functions, and stepping one statement at a time (with dbstep) now works. Moving up and down the call stack with dbup and dbdown now works. The dbstack function is now available to print the current function call stack. The new dbquit function is available to exit the debugging mode. ** Improved traceback error messages. Traceback error messages are much more concise and easier to understand. They now display information about the function call stack instead of the stack of all statements that were active at the point of the error. ** Object Oriented Programming. Octave now includes OOP features and the user can create their own class objects and overloaded functions and operators. For example, all methods of a class called "myclass" will be found in a directory "@myclass" on the users path. The class specific versions of functions and operators take precedence over the generic versions of these functions. New functions related to OOP include class inferiorto isobject loadobj methods superiorto See the Octave manual for more details. ** Parsing of Command-style Functions. Octave now parses command-style functions without needing to first declare them with "mark_as_command". The rules for recognizing a command-style function calls are * A command must appear as the first word in a statement, followed by a space. * The first character after the space must not be '=' or '(' * The next token after the space must not look like a binary operator. These rules should be mostly compatible with the way Matlab parses command-style function calls and allow users to define commands in .m files without having to mark them as commands. Note that previous versions of Octave allowed expressions like x = load -text foo.dat but an expression like this will now generate a parse error. In order to assign the value returned by a function to a variable, you must use the normal function call syntax: x = load ("-text", "foo.dat"); ** Block comments. Commented code can be between matching "#{" and "#}" or "%{" and "%}" markers, even if the commented code spans several line. This allows blocks code to be commented, without needing to comment each line. For example, function [s, t] = func (x, y) s = 2 * x; #{ s *= y; t = y + x; #} endfunction the lines "s *= y;" and "t = y + x" will not be executed. ** If any subfunction in a file ends with "end" or "endfunction", then they all must end that way. Previously, Octave accepted function main () ... # no endfunction here. function sub () ... endfunction but this is no longer allowed. ** Special treatment in the parser of expressions like "a' * b". In these cases the transpose is no longer explicitly formed and BLAS libraries are called with the transpose flagged, significantly improving performance for these kinds of operations. ** Single Precision data type. Octave now includes a single precision data type. Single precision variables can be created with the "single" command, or from functions like ones, eye, etc. For example, single (1) ones (2, 2, "single") zeros (2, 2, "single") eye (2, 2, "single") Inf (2, 2, "single") NaN (2, 2, "single") NA (2, 2, "single") all create single precision variables. For compatibility with Matlab, mixed double/single precision operators and functions return single precision types. As a consequence of this addition to Octave the internal representation of the double precision NA value has changed, and so users that make use of data generated by Octave with R or visa-versa are warned that compatibility might not be assured. ** Improved array indexing. The underlying code used for indexing of arrays has been completely rewritten and indexing is now significantly faster. ** Improved memory management. Octave will now attempt to share data in some cases where previously a copy would be made, such as certain array slicing operations or conversions between cells, structs and cs-lists. This usually reduces both time and memory consumption. Also, Octave will now attempt to detect and optimize usage of a vector as a stack, when elements are being repeatedly inserted at/removed from the end of the vector. ** Improved performance for reduction operations. The performance of the sum, prod, sumsq, cumsum, cumprod, any, all, max and min functions has been significantly improved. ** Sorting and searching. The performance of sort has been improved, especially when sorting indices are requested. An efficient built-in issorted implementation was added. The sortrows function now uses a more efficient algorithm, especially in the homogeneous case. The lookup function is now a built-in function performing a binary search, optimized for long runs of close elements. Lookup also works with cell arrays of strings. ** Range arithmetics For some operations on ranges, Octave will attempt to keep the result as a range. These include negation, adding a scalar, subtracting a scalar, and multiplying by a scalar. Ranges with zero increment are allowed and can be constructed using the built-in function `ones'. ** Various performance improvements. Performance of a number of other built-in operations and functions was improved, including: * logical operations * comparison operators * element-wise power * accumarray * cellfun * isnan * isinf * isfinite * nchoosek * repmat * strcmp ** 64-bit integer arithmetic. Arithmetic with 64-bit integers (int64 and uint64 types) is fully supported, with saturation semantics like the other integer types. Performance of most integer arithmetic operations has been improved by using integer arithmetic directly. Previously, Octave performed integer math with saturation semantics by converting the operands to double precision, performing the operation, and then converting the result back to an integer value, truncating if necessary. ** Diagonal and permutation matrices. The interpreter can now treat diagonal and permutation matrices as special objects that store only the non-zero elements, rather than general full matrices. Therefore, it is now possible to construct and use these matrices in linear algebra without suffering a performance penalty due to storing large numbers of zero elements. ** Improvements to fsolve. The fsolve function now accepts an option structure argument (see also the optimset function). The INFO values returned from fsolve have changed to be compatible with Matlab's fsolve function. Additionally, fsolve is now able to solve overdetermined systems, complex-differentiable complex systems, systems with a sparse jacobian and can work in single precision if given single precision inputs. It can also be called recursively. ** Improvements to the norm function. The norm function is now able to compute row or column norms of a matrix in a single call, as well as general matrix p-norms. ** New functions for computing some eigenvalues or singular values. The eigs and svds functions have been included in Octave. These functions require the ARPACK library (now distributed under a GPL-compatible license). ** New QR and Cholesky factorization updating functions. choldelete cholshift qrdelete qrshift cholinsert cholupdate qrinsert qrupdate ** New quadrature functions. dblquad quadgk quadv triplequad ** New functions for reading and writing images. The imwrite and imread functions have been included in Octave. These functions require the GraphicsMagick library. The new function imfinfo provides information about an image file (size, type, colors, etc.) ** The input_event_hook function has been replaced by the pair of functions add_input_event_hook and remove_input_event_hook so that more than one hook function may be installed at a time. ** Other miscellaneous new functions. addtodate hypot reallog bicgstab idivide realpow cellslices info realsqrt cgs interp1q rectint command_line_path isdebugmode regexptranslate contrast isfloat restoredefaultpath convn isstrprop roundb cummin log1p rundemos cummax lsqnonneg runlength datetick matlabroot saveobj display namelengthmax spaugment expm1 nargoutchk strchr filemarker pathdef strvcat fstat perl subspace full prctile symvar fzero quantile treelayout genvarname re_read_readline_init_file validatestring histc ** Changes to strcat. The strcat function is now compatible with Matlab's strcat function, which removes trailing whitespace when concatenating character strings. For example strcat ('foo ', 'bar') ==> 'foobar' The new function cstrcat provides the previous behavior of Octave's strcat. ** Improvements to the help functions. The help system has been mostly re-implemented in .m files to make it easier to modify. Performance of the lookfor function has been greatly improved by caching the help text from all functions that are distributed with Octave. The pkg function has been modified to generate cache files for external packages when they are installed. ** Deprecated functions. The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.0 and will be removed from Octave 3.4 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.0): beta_cdf geometric_pdf pascal_pdf beta_inv geometric_rnd pascal_rnd beta_pdf hypergeometric_cdf poisson_cdf beta_rnd hypergeometric_inv poisson_inv binomial_cdf hypergeometric_pdf poisson_pdf binomial_inv hypergeometric_rnd poisson_rnd binomial_pdf intersection polyinteg binomial_rnd is_bool setstr chisquare_cdf is_complex struct_contains chisquare_inv is_list struct_elements chisquare_pdf is_matrix t_cdf chisquare_rnd is_scalar t_inv clearplot is_square t_pdf clg is_stream t_rnd com2str is_struct uniform_cdf exponential_cdf is_symmetric uniform_inv exponential_inv is_vector uniform_pdf exponential_pdf isstr uniform_rnd exponential_rnd lognormal_cdf weibcdf f_cdf lognormal_inv weibinv f_inv lognormal_pdf weibpdf f_pdf lognormal_rnd weibrnd f_rnd meshdom weibull_cdf gamma_cdf normal_cdf weibull_inv gamma_inv normal_inv weibull_pdf gamma_pdf normal_pdf weibull_rnd gamma_rnd normal_rnd wiener_rnd geometric_cdf pascal_cdf geometric_inv pascal_inv The following functions are now deprecated in Octave 3.2 and will be removed from Octave 3.6 (or whatever version is the second major release after 3.2): create_set spcholinv spmax dmult spcumprod spmin iscommand spcumsum spprod israwcommand spdet spqr lchol spdiag spsum loadimage spfind spsumsq mark_as_command spinv str2mat mark_as_rawcommand spkron unmark_command spatan2 splchol unmark_rawcommand spchol split spchol2inv splu See NEWS.3 for old news. |