Mercurial > web-octave
diff NEWS-3.2.html @ 94:e8fc61e077fc
Merged closed branch "kai" into default.
author | Kai T. Ohlhus <k.ohlhus@gmail.com> |
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date | Tue, 01 Nov 2016 01:06:10 +0100 |
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--- /dev/null Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000 +++ b/NEWS-3.2.html Tue Nov 01 01:06:10 2016 +0100 @@ -0,0 +1,398 @@ +<pre> +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_backends ezmeshc intwarning surfl + backend 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 backend is disabled by + default. You can switch to using it with the command + + backend ("fltk") + + for all future figures or for a particular figure with the command + + backend (h, "fltk") + + where "h" is a valid figure handle. Please note that this backend + does not yet support text objects. Obviously, this is a necessary + feature before it can be considered usable. We are looking for + volunteers to help implement this missing feature. + + ** 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. + + ** 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. sortrows now uses a more efficient algorithm, especially + in the homegeneous case. lookup 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 in 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 in 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. +</pre>