diff NEWS-3.2.html @ 94:e8fc61e077fc

Merged closed branch "kai" into default.
author Kai T. Ohlhus <k.ohlhus@gmail.com>
date Tue, 01 Nov 2016 01:06:10 +0100
parents
children
line wrap: on
line diff
--- /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>