--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/NEWS-3.6.html	Tue Nov 01 01:06:10 2016 +0100
@@ -0,0 +1,213 @@
+<pre>
+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
+</pre>