changeset 18069:76006571e45a

maint: Periodic merge of stable to default.
author Rik <rik@octave.org>
date Tue, 03 Dec 2013 16:06:46 -0800
parents 23f680301f65 (diff) 1c4fd938bdef (current diff)
children ff05d5b70411
files configure.ac src/main.in.cc
diffstat 45 files changed, 2225 insertions(+), 3247 deletions(-) [+]
line wrap: on
line diff
--- a/NEWS	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/NEWS	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -1,373 +1,14 @@
-Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.8:
+Summary of important user-visible changes for version 4.2:
 ---------------------------------------------------------
 
-  ** 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'.
+ ** Other new functions added in 4.2:
 
- ** 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
+      *none*
 
  ** 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):
+    The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.8 and have been
+    removed from Octave 4.2.
 
       default_save_options    java_new            
       gen_doc_cache           java_set                   
@@ -379,1143 +20,52 @@
       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):
+    The following functions have been deprecated in Octave 4.2 and will
+    be removed from Octave 4.6 (or whatever version is the second major
+    release after 4.2):
+
+      *none*
+
+
+    The following keywords were deprecated in Octave 3.8 and have been
+    removed from Octave 4.2
 
       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):
+    The following configuration variables were deprecated in Octave 3.8
+    and have been removed from Octave 4.2
 
       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.
+    The internal class <Octave_map> was deprecated in Octave 3.8 and has
+    been removed from Octave 4.2.  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:
+Summary of important user-visible changes for version 4.0:
 ---------------------------------------------------------
 
- ** 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)
+ ** Other new functions added in 4.0.0:
 
- ** 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                   
+      validateattributes
 
  ** Deprecated functions.
 
-    The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.2 and have been
-    removed from Octave 3.6.
+    The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.6 and have been
+    removed from Octave 4.0.
                                            
-      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.
+      cut                polyderiv        
+      cor                shell_cmd        
+      corrcoef           studentize       
+      __error_text__     sylvester_matrix 
+      error_text         
 
- ** 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 4.0 and will
+    be removed from Octave 4.4 (or whatever version is the second major
+    release after 4.0):
 
- ** 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.
+    *none*
 
- ** 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.
--- a/build-aux/common.mk	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/build-aux/common.mk	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -105,8 +105,6 @@
 # C compiler flags.
 
 CC = @CC@
-## FIXME: CC_VERSION is deprecated and should be removed in version 3.12
-CC_VERSION = @CC_VERSION@
 GCC_VERSION = @GCC_VERSION@
 CPICFLAG = @CPICFLAG@
 XTRA_CFLAGS = @XTRA_CFLAGS@
@@ -129,8 +127,6 @@
 # C++ compiler flags.
 
 CXX = @CXX@
-## FIXME: CXX_VERSION is deprecated and should be removed in version 3.12
-CXX_VERSION = @CXX_VERSION@
 GXX_VERSION = @GXX_VERSION@
 CXXCPP = @CXXCPP@
 CXXPICFLAG = @CXXPICFLAG@
@@ -516,7 +512,6 @@
   -e "s|%OCTAVE_CONF_CANONICAL_HOST_TYPE%|\"${canonical_host_type}\"|" \
   -e "s|%OCTAVE_CONF_CARBON_LIBS%|\"${CARBON_LIBS}\"|" \
   -e "s|%OCTAVE_CONF_CC%|\"${CC}\"|" \
-  -e "s|%OCTAVE_CONF_CC_VERSION%|\"${CC_VERSION}\"|" \
   -e "s|%OCTAVE_CONF_CCOLAMD_CPPFLAGS%|\"${CCOLAMD_CPPFLAGS}\"|" \
   -e "s|%OCTAVE_CONF_CCOLAMD_LDFLAGS%|\"${CCOLAMD_LDFLAGS}\"|" \
   -e "s|%OCTAVE_CONF_CCOLAMD_LIBS%|\"${CCOLAMD_LIBS}\"|" \
--- a/configure.ac	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/configure.ac	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
 ### <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
 
 AC_PREREQ([2.62])
-AC_INIT([GNU Octave], [3.7.7+], [http://octave.org/bugs.html], [octave])
+AC_INIT([GNU Octave], [4.1.0+], [http://octave.org/bugs.html], [octave])
 
 dnl PACKAGE_VERSION is set by the AC_INIT VERSION arg
 OCTAVE_VERSION="$PACKAGE_VERSION"
@@ -305,10 +305,6 @@
 fi
 AC_SUBST(GXX_VERSION)
 
-## FIXME: CXX_VERSION is deprecated and should be removed in Octave version 3.12
-CXX_VERSION=$gxx_version
-AC_SUBST(CXX_VERSION)
-
 ### Determine which C compiler to use (we expect to find gcc).
 
 AC_PROG_CC
@@ -355,10 +351,6 @@
 fi
 AC_SUBST(GCC_VERSION)
 
-## FIXME: CC_VERSION is deprecated and should be removed in Octave version 3.12
-CC_VERSION=$GCC_VERSION
-AC_SUBST(CC_VERSION)
-
 ### Also check g++ version number, it might be different from the
 ## gcc version number.
 
@@ -2153,7 +2145,7 @@
 dnl These checks define/undefine HAVE_FUNCNAME in config.h.
 dnl Code tests HAVE_FUNCNAME and either uses function or provides workaround.
 dnl Use multiple AC_CHECKs to avoid line continuations '\' in list
-AC_CHECK_FUNCS([canonicalize_file_name ctermid dup2])
+AC_CHECK_FUNCS([ctermid dup2])
 AC_CHECK_FUNCS([endgrent endpwent execvp expm1 expm1f fork])
 AC_CHECK_FUNCS([getegid geteuid getgid getgrent getgrgid getgrnam])
 AC_CHECK_FUNCS([getpgrp getpid getppid getpwent getpwuid getuid])
--- a/doc/interpreter/func.txi	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/doc/interpreter/func.txi	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -393,6 +393,8 @@
 which stops the function execution and prints a message about the correct
 way to call the function whenever the number of inputs is wrong.
 
+@DOCSTRING(validateattributes)
+
 For compatibility with @sc{matlab}, @code{nargchk}, @code{narginchk} and
 @code{nargoutchk} are available which provide similar error checking.
 
--- a/etc/NEWS.3	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/etc/NEWS.3	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -1,3 +1,1523 @@
+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                polyderiv
+      cor                shell_cmd 
+      corrcoef           studentize
+      __error_text__     sylvester_matrix
+      error_text         
+
+ ** 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
+
 Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.0:
 ---------------------------------------------------------
 
@@ -196,5 +1716,6 @@
     the distributions using the standard scale factor rather than
     one over the scale factor.
 
+---------------------------------------------------------
 
 See NEWS.2 for old news.
--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/etc/RELEASE.PROCESS	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+<! This file contains a list of steps to accomplish before producing a release.
+   The format of the file is wiki markup and can be directly used as a page
+   on wiki.octave.org.
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+==3.8 Release Tasks==
+
+This page shows the tasks to be completed before the 3.8 release is finalized.
+
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# File bug reports for all outstanding bugs known, but not reported
+#: Completion Date: 10/16/2013
+## Put out a general call for reports on Octave-Maintainers and Octave-Help list
+##: Completion Date: 10/9/2013
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Review patch tracker/bug list for any patches submitted that may be included before release
+#: Completion Date: 10/24/2013
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Identify Bugs which *must* be fixed prior to release
+#: Completion Date: 10/20/2013
+## Start discussion about criteria on octave-maintainers list
+## Possible Criteria:
+##* Severity >= 4
+##* Item Group == ("Crash" or "Regression")
+##* Item Group == "Build Failure"
+## Review bugs on tracker for possible inclusion in list
+## Review bugs and update to correct category, such as Patch Submitted.
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Clear all bugs identified as must-fix
+#: Completion Date: 10/26/2013
+## See [[3.8 Bug Fix List]]
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# GPL License activities
+## Update Copyright statements for all source controlled files
+## Add any new contributors to contributors.in
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Style-check code base
+## This will produce lots of whitespace changes, but no behavior changes.
+## Must occur after patches have been added since whitespace changes will often prevent patches from applying.
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Run lint checker on code base
+## cppcheck, Clang sanitize, etc.
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Verify 'make check' is passing
+## Start discussion on octave-maintainers list about which failing tests must be fixed
+## Identify and fix any tests determined critical in step above
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Run Octave test suite under Valgrind to check for memory leaks
+## Done: 10/17/13
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Review documentation
+## Grammar check documentation so that it conforms to Octave standards
+## Spellcheck documentation
+## Verify no functions missing from manual
+## Verify deprecated functions removed from seealso links
+## Verify all formats (Info, HTML, pdf) build correctly
+## Review NEWS for any features which should be announced
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Localization and Internationalization
+## Submit call for translations for GUI strings.
+## Completion Date: 11/1/13
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Verify build process and create release candidates
+## Update version information in configure.ac/Makefile.am
+## Verify 'make distcheck' passes
+## Create release candidate
+### 'make dist'
+### hg tag repository with release candidate ID
+### For Windows, create installer [[Windows Installer]]
+### Upload release candidate
+### Announce release candidate to Octave-Maintainers, Octave-Help, on web page
+### Repeat release candidate cycle until clean
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Final Release
+## hg tag repository with release
+## merge default onto stable to become the current stable release
+## add new release version to Savannah bug tracker
+## Announce final release on Octave mailing lists and web site
+<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
+# Post-Release
+## Update configure.ac/Makefile.am versioning to next release cycle
+## Remove all deprecated functions scheduled for deletion in 4.0 from default branch
+
+[[Category:Releases]]
--- a/libinterp/corefcn/toplev.cc	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/libinterp/corefcn/toplev.cc	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -1251,8 +1251,6 @@
     { false, "CAMD_LIBS", OCTAVE_CONF_CAMD_LIBS },
     { false, "CARBON_LIBS", OCTAVE_CONF_CARBON_LIBS },
     { false, "CC", OCTAVE_CONF_CC },
-    // FIXME: CC_VERSION is deprecated.  Remove in version 3.12
-    { false, "CC_VERSION", OCTAVE_CONF_CC_VERSION },
     { false, "CCOLAMD_CPPFLAGS", OCTAVE_CONF_CCOLAMD_CPPFLAGS },
     { false, "CCOLAMD_LDFLAGS", OCTAVE_CONF_CCOLAMD_LDFLAGS },
     { false, "CCOLAMD_LIBS", OCTAVE_CONF_CCOLAMD_LIBS },
@@ -1275,8 +1273,6 @@
     { false, "CXXCPP", OCTAVE_CONF_CXXCPP },
     { false, "CXXFLAGS", OCTAVE_CONF_CXXFLAGS },
     { false, "CXXPICFLAG", OCTAVE_CONF_CXXPICFLAG },
-    // FIXME: CXX_VERSION is deprecated.  Remove in version 3.12
-    { false, "CXX_VERSION", OCTAVE_CONF_CXX_VERSION },
     { false, "DEFAULT_PAGER", OCTAVE_DEFAULT_PAGER },
     { false, "DEFS", OCTAVE_CONF_DEFS },
     { false, "DL_LD", OCTAVE_CONF_DL_LD },
--- a/libinterp/octave-value/ov-class.cc	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/libinterp/octave-value/ov-class.cc	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -2016,33 +2016,113 @@
 %!error class ()
 */
 
-DEFUN (__isa_parent__, args, ,
+DEFUN (isa, args, ,
        "-*- texinfo -*-\n\
-@deftypefn {Built-in Function} {} __isa_parent__ (@var{class}, @var{name})\n\
-Undocumented internal function.\n\
+@deftypefn {Function File} {} isa (@var{obj}, @var{classname})\n\
+Return true if @var{obj} is an object from the class @var{classname}.\n\
+\n\
+@var{classname} may also be one of the following class categories:\n\
+\n\
+@table @asis\n\
+@item @qcode{\"float\"}\n\
+Floating point value comprising classes @qcode{\"double\"} and\n\
+@qcode{\"single\"}.\n\
+\n\
+@item @qcode{\"integer\"}\n\
+Integer value comprising classes (u)int8, (u)int16, (u)int32, (u)int64.\n\
+\n\
+@item @qcode{\"numeric\"}\n\
+Numeric value comprising either a floating point or integer value.\n\
+@end table\n\
+\n\
+If @var{classname} is a cell array of string, a logical array of the same\n\
+size is returned, containing true for each class to which @var{obj}\n\
+belongs to.\n\
+\n\
+@seealso{class, typeinfo}\n\
 @end deftypefn")
 {
-  octave_value retval = false;
-
-  if (args.length () == 2)
+  octave_value retval;
+
+  if (args.length () != 2)
+    {
+      print_usage ();
+      return retval;
+    }
+
+  octave_value obj = args(0); // not const because of find_parent_class ()
+  const Array<std::string> cls = args(1).cellstr_value ();
+  if (error_state)
+    {
+      error ("isa: CLASSNAME must be a string or cell attay of strings");
+      return retval;
+    }
+
+  boolNDArray matches (cls.dims (), false);
+  const octave_idx_type n = cls.numel ();
+  for (octave_idx_type idx = 0; idx < n; idx++)
     {
-      octave_value cls = args(0);
-      octave_value nm = args(1);
-
-      if (! error_state)
-        {
-          if (cls.find_parent_class (nm.string_value ()))
-            retval = true;
-        }
-      else
-        error ("__isa_parent__: expecting arguments to be character strings");
+      const std::string cl = cls(idx);
+      if ((cl == "float"   && obj.is_float_type   ()) ||
+          (cl == "integer" && obj.is_integer_type ()) ||
+          (cl == "numeric" && obj.is_numeric_type ()) ||
+          obj.class_name () == cl || obj.find_parent_class (cl))
+        matches(idx) = true;
     }
-  else
-    print_usage ();
-
-  return retval;
+  return octave_value (matches);
 }
 
+/*
+%!assert (isa ("char", "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (logical (1), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (double (13), "float"), true)
+%!assert (isa (single (13), "float"), true)
+%!assert (isa (int8 (13), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (int16 (13), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (int32 (13), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (int64 (13), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (uint8 (13), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (uint16 (13), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (uint32 (13), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa (uint64 (13), "float"), false)
+%!assert (isa ("char", "numeric"), false)
+%!assert (isa (logical (1), "numeric"), false)
+%!assert (isa (double (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (single (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (int8 (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (int16 (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (int32 (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (int64 (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (uint8 (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (uint16 (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (uint32 (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (uint64 (13), "numeric"), true)
+%!assert (isa (uint8 (13), "integer"), true)
+%!assert (isa (double (13), "integer"), false)
+%!assert (isa (single (13), "integer"), false)
+%!assert (isa (single (13), {"integer", "float", "single"}), [false true true])
+
+%!assert (isa (double (13), "double"))
+%!assert (isa (single (13), "single"))
+%!assert (isa (int8 (13), "int8"))
+%!assert (isa (int16 (13), "int16"))
+%!assert (isa (int32 (13), "int32"))
+%!assert (isa (int64 (13), "int64"))
+%!assert (isa (uint8 (13), "uint8"))
+%!assert (isa (uint16 (13), "uint16"))
+%!assert (isa (uint32 (13), "uint32"))
+%!assert (isa (uint64 (13), "uint64"))
+%!assert (isa ("string", "char"))
+%!assert (isa (true, "logical"))
+%!assert (isa (false, "logical"))
+%!assert (isa ({1, 2}, "cell"))
+%!assert (isa ({1, 2}, {"numeric", "integer", "cell"}), [false false true])
+
+%!test
+%! a.b = 1;
+%! assert (isa (a, "struct"));
+*/
+
 DEFUN (__parent_classes__, args, ,
        "-*- texinfo -*-\n\
 @deftypefn {Built-in Function} {} __parent_classes__ (@var{x})\n\
--- a/liboctave/system/file-ops.cc	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/liboctave/system/file-ops.cc	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -689,8 +689,6 @@
 
   std::string retval;
 
-#if defined (HAVE_CANONICALIZE_FILE_NAME)
-
   char *tmp = gnulib::canonicalize_file_name (name.c_str ());
 
   if (tmp)
@@ -699,98 +697,6 @@
       free (tmp);
     }
 
-#elif defined (HAVE_RESOLVEPATH)
-
-#if !defined (errno)
-extern int errno;
-#endif
-
-#if !defined (__set_errno)
-# define __set_errno(Val) errno = (Val)
-#endif
-
-  if (name.empty ())
-    {
-      __set_errno (ENOENT);
-      return retval;
-    }
-
-  // All known hosts with resolvepath (e.g. Solaris 7) don't turn
-  // relative names into absolute ones, so prepend the working
-  // directory if the path is not absolute.
-
-  std::string absolute_name = octave_env::make_absolute (name);
-
-  size_t resolved_size = absolute_name.length ();
-
-  while (true)
-    {
-      resolved_size = 2 * resolved_size + 1;
-
-      OCTAVE_LOCAL_BUFFER (char, resolved, resolved_size);
-
-      int resolved_len
-        = resolvepath (absolute_name.c_str (), resolved, resolved_size);
-
-      if (resolved_len < 0)
-        break;
-
-      if (resolved_len < resolved_size)
-        {
-          retval = resolved;
-          break;
-        }
-    }
-
-#elif defined (__WIN32__)
-
-  int n = 1024;
-
-  std::string win_path (n, '\0');
-
-  while (true)
-    {
-      int status = GetFullPathName (name.c_str (), n, &win_path[0], 0);
-
-      if (status == 0)
-        break;
-      else if (status < n)
-        {
-          win_path.resize (status);
-          retval = win_path;
-          break;
-        }
-      else
-        {
-          n *= 2;
-          win_path.resize (n);
-        }
-    }
-
-#elif defined (HAVE_REALPATH)
-
-#if !defined (__set_errno)
-# define __set_errno(Val) errno = (Val)
-#endif
-
-  if (name.empty ())
-    {
-      __set_errno (ENOENT);
-      return retval;
-    }
-
-  OCTAVE_LOCAL_BUFFER (char, buf, PATH_MAX);
-
-  if (::realpath (name.c_str (), buf))
-    retval = buf;
-
-#else
-
-  // FIXME: provide replacement here...
-  retval = name;
-
-#endif
-
   if (retval.empty ())
     msg = gnulib::strerror (errno);
 
--- a/scripts/deprecated/__error_text__.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,37 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2012-2013 John W. Eaton
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Built-in Function} {[@var{msg}, @var{msgid}] =} __error_text__ (@var{msg}, @var{msgid})
-## This function has been deprecated.  Use @code{lasterr} instead.
-## @seealso{lasterr}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function [msg, msgid] = __error_text__ (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "__error_text__ is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use lasterr instead");
-  endif
-
-  [msg, msgid] = lasterr (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/cor.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,54 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 1995-2013 Kurt Hornik
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Function File} {} cor (@var{x})
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} cor (@var{x}, @var{y})
-## Compute matrix of correlation coefficients.
-##
-## This is an alias for @code{corrcoef}.
-## @seealso{corrcoef}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function retval = cor (x, y = x)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "cor is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; please use corr instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin < 1 || nargin > 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  retval = corrcoef (x, y);
-
-endfunction
-
-
-%!test
-%! x = rand (10, 2);
-%! assert (cor (x), corrcoef (x), 5*eps);
-%! assert (cor (x(:,1), x(:,2)) == corrcoef (x(:,1), x(:,2)));
-
-%% Test input validation
-%!error corrcoef ();
-%!error corrcoef (1, 2, 3);
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/corrcoef.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,119 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 1996-2013 John W. Eaton
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Function File} {} corrcoef (@var{x})
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} corrcoef (@var{x}, @var{y})
-## Compute matrix of correlation coefficients.
-##
-## If each row of @var{x} and @var{y} is an observation and each column is
-## a variable, then the @w{(@var{i}, @var{j})-th} entry of
-## @code{corrcoef (@var{x}, @var{y})} is the correlation between the
-## @var{i}-th variable in @var{x} and the @var{j}-th variable in @var{y}.
-## @tex
-## $$
-## {\rm corrcoef}(x,y) = {{\rm cov}(x,y) \over {\rm std}(x) {\rm std}(y)}
-## $$
-## @end tex
-## @ifnottex
-##
-## @example
-## corrcoef(x,y) = cov(x,y)/(std(x)*std(y))
-## @end example
-##
-## @end ifnottex
-## If called with one argument, compute @code{corrcoef (@var{x}, @var{x})},
-## the correlation between the columns of @var{x}.
-## @seealso{cov}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Author: Kurt Hornik <hornik@wu-wien.ac.at>
-## Created: March 1993
-## Adapted-By: jwe
-
-function retval = corrcoef (x, y = [])
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "corrcoef is not equivalent to Matlab and will be removed from a future version of Octave; for similar functionality see corr");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin < 1 || nargin > 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  ## Input validation is done by cov.m.  Don't repeat tests here
-
-  ## Special case, scalar is always 100% correlated with itself
-  if (isscalar (x))
-    if (isa (x, 'single'))
-      retval = single (1);
-    else
-      retval = 1;
-    endif
-    return;
-  endif
-
-  ## No check for division by zero error, which happens only when
-  ## there is a constant vector and should be rare.
-  if (nargin == 2)
-    c = cov (x, y);
-    s = std (x)' * std (y);
-    retval = c ./ s;
-  else
-    c = cov (x);
-    s = sqrt (diag (c));
-    retval = c ./ (s * s');
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
-
-%!test
-%! x = rand (10);
-%! cc1 = corrcoef (x);
-%! cc2 = corrcoef (x, x);
-%! assert (size (cc1) == [10, 10] && size (cc2) == [10, 10]);
-%! assert (cc1, cc2, sqrt (eps));
-
-%!test
-%! x = [1:3]';
-%! y = [3:-1:1]';
-%! assert (corrcoef (x,y), -1, 5*eps)
-%! assert (corrcoef (x,flipud (y)), 1, 5*eps)
-%! assert (corrcoef ([x, y]), [1 -1; -1 1], 5*eps)
-
-%!test
-%! x = single ([1:3]');
-%! y = single ([3:-1:1]');
-%! assert (corrcoef (x,y), single (-1), 5*eps)
-%! assert (corrcoef (x,flipud (y)), single (1), 5*eps)
-%! assert (corrcoef ([x, y]), single ([1 -1; -1 1]), 5*eps)
-
-%!assert (corrcoef (5), 1);
-%!assert (corrcoef (single(5)), single(1));
-
-%% Test input validation
-%!error corrcoef ();
-%!error corrcoef (1, 2, 3);
-%!error corrcoef ([1; 2], ["A", "B"]);
-%!error corrcoef (ones (2,2,2));
-%!error corrcoef (ones (2,2), ones (2,2,2));
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/cut.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,72 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 1996-2013 Kurt Hornik
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Function File} {} cut (@var{x}, @var{breaks})
-## Create categorical data from numerical or continuous data by
-## cutting into intervals.
-##
-## If @var{breaks} is a scalar, the data is cut into that many
-## equal-width intervals.  If @var{breaks} is a vector of break points,
-## the category has @code{length (@var{breaks}) - 1} groups.
-##
-## The returned value is a vector of the same size as @var{x} telling
-## which group each point in @var{x} belongs to.  Groups are labelled
-## from 1 to the number of groups; points outside the range of
-## @var{breaks} are labelled by @code{NaN}.
-## @seealso{histc}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Author: KH <Kurt.Hornik@wu-wien.ac.at>
-## Description: Cut data into intervals
-
-function group = cut (x, breaks)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "cut is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; please use histc instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin != 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  if (!isvector (x))
-    error ("cut: X must be a vector");
-  endif
-  if (isscalar (breaks))
-    breaks = linspace (min (x), max (x), breaks + 1);
-    breaks(1) = breaks(1) - 1;
-  elseif (isvector (breaks))
-    breaks = sort (breaks);
-  else
-    error ("cut: BREAKS must be a scalar or vector");
-  endif
-
-  group = NaN (size (x));
-  m = length (breaks);
-  if (any (k = find ((x >= min (breaks)) & (x < max (breaks)))))
-    n = length (k);
-    group(k) = sum ((ones (m, 1) * reshape (x(k), 1, n))
-                    >= (reshape (breaks, m, 1) * ones (1, n)));
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/default_save_options.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,42 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Built-in Function} {@var{val} =} default_save_options ()
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {@var{old_val} =} default_save_options (@var{new_val})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {} default_save_options (@var{new_val}, "local")
-## This function has been deprecated.  Use @code{@file{save_default_options}}
-## instead.
-## @seealso{save_default_options}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Deprecated in 3.8
-
-function retval = default_save_options (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "default_save_options is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use save_default_options instead");
-  endif
-
-  retval = save_default_options (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/error_text.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,37 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2012-2013 John W. Eaton
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Built-in Function} {[@var{msg}, @var{msgid}] =} error_text (@var{msg}, @var{msgid})
-## This function has been deprecated.  Use @code{lasterr} instead.
-## @seealso{lasterr}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function [msg, msgid] = error_text (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "error_text is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use lasterr instead");
-  endif
-
-  [msg, msgid] = lasterr (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/gen_doc_cache.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,39 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Function File} {} gen_doc_cache (@var{out_file}, @var{directory})
-## This function has been deprecated.  Use @code{doc_cache_create} instead.
-## @seealso{doc_cache_create}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Deprecated in 3.8
-
-function gen_doc_cache (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "gen_doc_cache is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use doc_cache_create instead");
-  endif
-
-  doc_cache_create (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/interp1q.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,81 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2008-2013 David Bateman
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Function File} {@var{yi} =} interp1q (@var{x}, @var{y}, @var{xi})
-## One-dimensional linear interpolation without error checking.
-## Interpolates @var{y}, defined at the points @var{x}, at the points
-## @var{xi}.  The sample points @var{x} must be a strictly monotonically
-## increasing column vector.  If @var{y} is a matrix or an N-dimensional
-## array, the interpolation is performed on each column of @var{y}.  If
-## @var{y} is a vector, it must be a column vector of the same length as
-## @var{x}.
-##
-## Values of @var{xi} beyond the endpoints of the interpolation result
-## in NA being returned.
-##
-## Note that the error checking is only a significant portion of the
-## execution time of this @code{interp1} if the size of the input arguments
-## is relatively small.  Therefore, the benefit of using @code{interp1q}
-## is relatively small.
-## @seealso{interp1}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function yi = interp1q (x, y, xi)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "interp1q is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; use interp1 instead");
-  endif
-
-  x = x(:);
-  nx = rows (x);
-  szy = size (y);
-  y = y(:,:);
-  [ny, nc] = size (y);
-  szx = size (xi);
-  xi = xi (:);
-  dy = diff (y);
-  dx = diff (x);
-  idx = lookup (x, xi, "lr");
-  s = (xi - x (idx)) ./ dx (idx);
-  yi = bsxfun (@times, s, dy(idx,:)) + y(idx,:);
-  range = xi < x(1) | !(xi <= x(nx));
-  yi(range,:) = NA;
-  if (length (szx) == 2 && any (szx == 1))
-    yi = reshape (yi, [max(szx), szy(2:end)]);
-  else
-    yi = reshape (yi, [szx, szy(2:end)]);
-  endif
-endfunction
-
-
-%!shared xp, yp, xi, yi
-%! xp = [0:2:10].';   yp = sin (2*pi*xp/5);
-%! xi = [-1; 0; 2.2; 4; 6.6; 10; 11];
-%! yi = interp1 (xp,yp,xi);
-%!assert (interp1q (xp,yp, [min(xp)-1; max(xp)+1]), [NA; NA]);
-%!assert (interp1q (xp,yp,xp), yp, 100*eps);
-%!assert (isempty (interp1q (xp,yp,[])));
-%!assert (interp1q (xp,yp,xi), yi);
-%!assert (interp1q (xp,[yp,yp],xi), [yi, yi]);
-%!assert (interp1q (xp,yp,[xi,xi]), [yi, yi]);
-%!assert (interp1q (xp,[yp,yp],[xi,xi]), cat (3, [yi, yi], [yi, yi]));
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/isequalwithequalnans.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,50 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2005-2013 William Poetra Yoga Hadisoeseno
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Function File} {} isequalwithequalnans (@var{x1}, @var{x2}, @dots{})
-## This function has been deprecated.  Use @code{@file{isequaln}} instead.
-## @seealso{isequaln}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Deprecated in 3.8
-
-function retval = isequalwithequalnans (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "isequalwithequalnans is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use isequaln instead");
-  endif
-
-  retval = isequaln (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
-
-## test for equality
-%!assert (isequalwithequalnans ({1,2,NaN,4},{1,2,NaN,4}), true)
-%!assert (isequalwithequalnans ([1,2,NaN,4],[1,2,NaN,4]), true)
-## test for inequality
-%!assert (isequalwithequalnans ([1,2,NaN,4],[1,NaN,3,4]), false)
-%!assert (isequalwithequalnans ([1,2,NaN,4],[1,2,3,4]), false)
-## test for equality (struct)
-%!assert (isequalwithequalnans (struct ('a',NaN,'b',2),struct ('a',NaN,'b',2),struct ('a',NaN,'b',2)), true)
-%!assert (isequalwithequalnans (1,2,1), false)
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/java_convert_matrix.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,48 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2012-2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Built-in Function} {@var{val} =} java_convert_matrix ()
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {@var{old_val} =} java_convert_matrix (@var{new_val})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {} java_convert_matrix (@var{new_val}, "local")
-## Query or set the internal variable that controls whether Java arrays are
-## automatically converted to Octave matrices.  The default value is false.
-## 
-## When called from inside a function with the @qcode{"local"} option, the
-## variable is changed locally for the function and any subroutines it calls.
-##  The original variable value is restored when exiting the function.
-## @seealso{java_matrix_autoconversion, java_unsigned_conversion, java_debug}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function old_val = java_convert_matrix (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "java_convert_matrix is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; use java_matrix_autoconversion instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin > 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  old_val = java_matrix_autoconversion (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/java_debug.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,49 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2012-2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Built-in Function} {@var{val} =} java_debug ()
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {@var{old_val} =} java_debug (@var{new_val})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {} java_debug (@var{new_val}, "local")
-## Query or set the internal variable that determines whether extra debugging
-## information regarding the initialization of the JVM and any Java exceptions
-## is printed.
-## 
-## When called from inside a function with the @qcode{"local"} option, the
-## variable is changed locally for the function and any subroutines it calls.
-##  The original variable value is restored when exiting the function.
-## @seealso{debug_java, java_convert_matrix, java_unsigned_conversion}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function old_val = java_debug (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "java_debug is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; use debug_java instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin > 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  old_val = debug_java (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/java_get.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,63 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2012-2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Loadable Function} {@var{val} =} java_get (@var{obj}, @var{name})
-## Get the value of the field @var{name} of the Java object @var{obj}.  For
-## static fields, @var{obj} can be a string representing the fully qualified
-## name of the corresponding class.
-## 
-## When @var{obj} is a regular Java object, structure-like indexing can be
-## used as a shortcut syntax.  For instance, the two following statements are
-## equivalent
-## 
-## @example
-## @group
-##   java_get (x, "field1")
-##   x.field1
-## @end group
-## @end example
-## 
-## @seealso{java_set, javaMethod, javaObject}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function retval = java_get (obj, name)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "java_get is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; use structure-like indexing instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin != 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  if (isjava (obj))
-    retval = obj.(name);
-  elseif (ischar (obj))
-    ## FIXME: Need a solution for getting static fields of class
-    ##        which does not depend on __java_get__ which will be removed.
-    retval = __java_get__ (obj, name);
-  else
-    error ("java_get: OBJ must be a Java object");
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/java_invoke.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,57 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2007, 2013 Michael Goffioul
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Built-in Function} {@var{ret} =} java_invoke (@var{obj}, @var{methodname})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {@var{ret} =} java_invoke (@var{obj}, @var{methodname}, @var{arg1}, @dots{})
-## Invoke the method @var{methodname} on the Java object @var{obj} with the
-## arguments @var{arg1}, @dots{}  For static methods, @var{obj} can be a
-## string representing the fully qualified name of the corresponding class. 
-## The function returns the result of the method invocation.
-## 
-## When @var{obj} is a regular Java object, structure-like indexing can be
-## used as a shortcut syntax.  For instance, the two following statements are
-## equivalent
-## 
-## @example
-## @group
-##   ret = java_invoke (x, "method1", 1.0, "a string")
-##   ret = x.method1 (1.0, "a string")
-## @end group
-## @end example
-## 
-## @seealso{javaMethod, javaObject}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function retval = java_invoke (obj, methodname, varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "java_invoke is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use javaMethod instead");
-  endif
-  
-  if (nargin < 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  retval = javaMethod (methodname, obj, varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/java_set.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,63 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2012-2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Loadable Function} {@var{obj} =} java_set (@var{obj}, @var{name}, @var{val})
-## Set the value of the field @var{name} of the Java object @var{obj} to
-## @var{val}.  For static fields, @var{obj} can be a string representing the
-## fully qualified named of the corresponding Java class.
-## 
-## When @var{obj} is a regular Java object, structure-like indexing can be
-## used as a shortcut syntax.  For instance, the two following statements are
-## equivalent
-## 
-## @example
-## @group
-##   java_set (x, "field1", val)
-##   x.field1 = val
-## @end group
-## @end example
-## 
-## @seealso{java_get, javaMethod, javaObject}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function retval = java_set (obj, name, val)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "java_set is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; use structure-like indexing instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin != 3)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  if (isjava (obj))
-    obj.(name) = val;
-  elseif (ischar (obj))
-    ## FIXME: Need a solution for getting static fields of class
-    ##        which does not depend on __java_set__ which will be removed.
-    retval = __java_set__ (obj, name, val);
-  else
-    error ("java_set: OBJ must be a Java object");
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/java_unsigned_conversion.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,50 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2012-2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Built-in Function} {@var{val} =} java_unsigned_conversion ()
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {@var{old_val} =} java_unsigned_conversion (@var{new_val})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {} java_unsigned_conversion (@var{new_val}, "local")
-## Query or set the internal variable that controls how integer classes are
-## converted when Java matrix autoconversion is enabled.  When enabled, Java
-## arrays of class Byte or Integer are converted to matrices of class uint8 or
-## uint32 respectively.
-## 
-## When called from inside a function with the @qcode{"local"} option, the
-## variable is changed locally for the function and any subroutines it calls.
-##  The original variable value is restored when exiting the function.
-## @seealso{java_unsigned_autoconversion, java_convert_matrix, debug_java}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function old_val = java_unsigned_conversion (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "java_unsigned_conversion is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; use java_unsigned_autoconversion instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin > 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  old_val = java_unsigned_autoconversion (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/javafields.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,54 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2007, 2013 Michael Goffioul
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Function File} {} javafields (@var{javaobj})
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} javafields ("@var{classname}")
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {@var{fld_names} =} javafields (@dots{})
-## Return the fields of a Java object or Java class in the form of a cell 
-## array of strings.  If no output is requested, print the result
-## to the standard output.
-## @seealso{fieldnames, methods, javaObject}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function fld_names = javafields (javaobj)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "javafields is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use fieldnames instead");
-  endif
-  
-  if (nargin != 1)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-  
-  c_methods = javaMethod ("getFields", "org.octave.ClassHelper", javaobj);
-  method_list = ostrsplit (c_methods, ';');
-
-  if (nargout == 0)
-    if (! isempty (method_list))
-      disp (method_list);
-    endif
-  else
-    fld_names = cellstr (method_list);
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/javamethods.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,54 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2007, 2013 Michael Goffioul
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Function File} {} javamethods (@var{javaobj})
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} javamethods ("@var{classname}")
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {@var{mtd_names} =} javamethods (@dots{})
-## Return the methods of a Java object or Java class in the form of a cell 
-## array of strings.  If no output is requested, print the result to the
-## standard output.
-## @seealso{methods, fieldnames, javaMethod, javaObject}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-function mtd_names = javamethods (classname)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "javamethods is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use methods instead");
-  endif
-  
-  if (nargin != 1)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  cls_methods = javaMethod ("getMethods", "org.octave.ClassHelper", classname);
-  method_list = ostrsplit (cls_methods, ';');
-
-  if (nargout == 0)
-    if (! isempty (method_list))
-      disp (method_list);
-    endif
-  else
-    mtd_names = cellstr (method_list);
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/module.mk	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/deprecated/module.mk	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -1,32 +1,7 @@
 FCN_FILE_DIRS += deprecated
 
 deprecated_FCN_FILES = \
-  deprecated/__error_text__.m \
-  deprecated/cor.m \
-  deprecated/corrcoef.m \
-  deprecated/cut.m \
-  deprecated/default_save_options.m \
-  deprecated/error_text.m \
-  deprecated/gen_doc_cache.m \
-  deprecated/interp1q.m \
-  deprecated/isequalwithequalnans.m \
-  deprecated/isstr.m \
-  deprecated/java_convert_matrix.m \
-  deprecated/java_debug.m \
-  deprecated/java_get.m \
-  deprecated/java_invoke.m \
-  deprecated/java_new.m \
-  deprecated/java_unsigned_conversion.m \
-  deprecated/java_set.m \
-  deprecated/javafields.m \
-  deprecated/javamethods.m \
-  deprecated/polyderiv.m \
-  deprecated/re_read_readline_init_file.m \
-  deprecated/read_readline_init_file.m \
-  deprecated/saving_history.m \
-  deprecated/shell_cmd.m \
-  deprecated/studentize.m \
-  deprecated/sylvester_matrix.m
+  deprecated/isstr.m
 
 FCN_FILES += $(deprecated_FCN_FILES)
 
--- a/scripts/deprecated/polyderiv.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,109 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 1994-2013 John W. Eaton
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Function File} {} polyderiv (@var{p})
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {[@var{k}] =} polyderiv (@var{a}, @var{b})
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {[@var{q}, @var{d}] =} polyderiv (@var{b}, @var{a})
-## Return the coefficients of the derivative of the polynomial whose
-## coefficients are given by the vector @var{p}.  If a pair of polynomials
-## is given, return the derivative of the product @math{@var{a}*@var{b}}.
-## If two inputs and two outputs are given, return the derivative of the
-## polynomial quotient @math{@var{b}/@var{a}}.  The quotient numerator is
-## in @var{q} and the denominator in @var{d}.
-## @seealso{poly, polyint, polyreduce, roots, conv, deconv, residue,
-## filter, polygcd, polyval, polyvalm}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Author: Tony Richardson <arichard@stark.cc.oh.us>
-## Created: June 1994
-## Adapted-By: jwe
-
-function [q, d] = polyderiv (p, a)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "polyderiv is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; please use polyder instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin == 1 || nargin == 2)
-    if (! isvector (p))
-      error ("polyderiv: argument must be a vector");
-    endif
-    if (nargin == 2)
-      if (! isvector (a))
-        error ("polyderiv: argument must be a vector");
-      endif
-      if (nargout == 1)
-        ## derivative of p*a returns a single polynomial
-        q = polyderiv (conv (p, a));
-      else
-        ## derivative of p/a returns numerator and denominator
-        d = conv (a, a);
-        if (numel (p) == 1)
-          q = -p * polyderiv (a);
-        elseif (numel (a) == 1)
-          q = a * polyderiv (p);
-        else
-          q = conv (polyderiv (p), a) - conv (p, polyderiv (a));
-          q = polyreduce (q);
-        endif
-
-        ## remove common factors from numerator and denominator
-        x = polygcd (q, d);
-        if (length(x) != 1)
-          q = deconv (q, x);
-          d = deconv (d, x);
-        endif
-
-        ## move all the gain into the numerator
-        q = q/d(1);
-        d = d/d(1);
-      endif
-    else
-      lp = numel (p);
-      if (lp == 1)
-        q = 0;
-        return;
-      elseif (lp == 0)
-        q = [];
-        return;
-      endif
-
-      ## Force P to be a row vector.
-      p = p(:).';
-
-      q = p(1:(lp-1)) .* [(lp-1):-1:1];
-    endif
-  else
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
-
-%!assert(all (all (polyderiv ([1, 2, 3]) == [2, 2])));
-
-%!assert(polyderiv (13) == 0);
-
-%!error polyderiv ([]);
-
-%!error polyderiv ([1, 2; 3, 4]);
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/re_read_readline_init_file.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,40 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Built-in Function} {} re_read_readline_init_file (@var{file})
-## This function has been deprecated.  Use
-## @code{@file{readline_re_read_init_file}} instead.
-## @seealso{readline_read_init_file}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Deprecated in 3.8
-
-function re_read_readline_init_file (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "re_read_readline_init_file is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use readline_re_read_init_file instead");
-  endif
-
-  readline_re_read_init_file (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/read_readline_init_file.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,40 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Built-in Function} {} read_readline_init_file (@var{file})
-## This function has been deprecated.  Use
-## @code{@file{readline_read_init_file}} instead.
-## @seealso{readline_read_init_file}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Deprecated in 3.8
-
-function read_readline_init_file (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "read_readline_init_file is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use readline_read_init_file instead");
-  endif
-
-  readline_read_init_file (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/saving_history.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,41 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Built-in Function} {@var{val} =} saving_history ()
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {@var{old_val} =} saving_history (@var{new_val})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {} saving_history (@var{new_val}, "local")
-## This function has been deprecated.  Use @code{@file{history_save}} instead.
-## @seealso{history_save}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Deprecated in 3.8
-
-function retval = saving_history (varargin)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "saving_history is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave, please use history_save instead");
-  endif
-
-  retval = save_default_options (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/shell_cmd.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,68 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2012-2013 Rik Wehbring
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## "-*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Built-in Function} {} shell_cmd (@var{string})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {} shell_cmd (@var{string}, @var{return_output})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {} shell_cmd (@var{string}, @var{return_output}, @var{type})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {[@var{status}, @var{output}] =} shell_cmd (@dots{})
-## @deftypefnx {Built-in Function} {[@var{status}, @var{output}] =} shell_cmd (@var{string}, @var{return_output}, @var{type})
-## Execute a shell command specified by @var{string}.
-## If the optional argument @var{type} is @qcode{"async"}, the process
-## is started in the background and the process id of the child process
-## is returned immediately.  Otherwise, the process is started and
-## Octave waits until it exits.  If the @var{type} argument is omitted, it
-## defaults to a value of @qcode{"sync"}.
-## 
-## If the optional argument @var{return_output} is true and the subprocess
-## is started synchronously, or if @var{shell_cmd} is called with one input
-## argument and one or more output arguments, then the output from the command
-## is returned.  Otherwise, if the subprocess is executed synchronously, its
-## output is sent to the standard output.
-##
-## The @code{shell_cmd} function can return two values.  The first is the
-## exit status of the command and the second is any output from the
-## command that was written to the standard output stream.  For example,
-## 
-## @example
-## [status, output] = shell_cmd ("echo foo; exit 2");
-## @end example
-## 
-## @noindent
-## will set the variable @code{output} to the string @samp{foo}, and the
-## variable @code{status} to the integer @samp{2}.
-## 
-## For commands run asynchronously, @var{status} is the process id of the
-## command shell that is started to run the command.
-## @seealso{system, unix, dos}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Deprecated in version 3.6
-
-function [status, output] = shell_cmd (varargin)
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "shell_cmd is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; please use system instead");
-  endif
-
-  [status, output] = system (varargin{:});
-
-endfunction
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/studentize.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,95 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 1995-2013 Kurt Hornik
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn  {Function File} {} studentize (@var{x})
-## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} studentize (@var{x}, @var{dim})
-## If @var{x} is a vector, subtract its mean and divide by its standard
-## deviation.
-##
-## If @var{x} is a matrix, do the above along the first non-singleton
-## dimension.
-## If the optional argument @var{dim} is given, operate along this dimension.
-## @seealso{center}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Author: KH <Kurt.Hornik@wu-wien.ac.at>
-## Description: Subtract mean and divide by standard deviation
-
-function t = studentize (x, dim)
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "studentize is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; please use zscore instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin != 1 && nargin != 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  if (! isnumeric(x))
-    error ("studentize: X must be a numeric vector or matrix");
-  endif
-
-  if (isinteger (x))
-    x = double (x);
-  endif
-
-  nd = ndims (x);
-  sz = size (x);
-  if (nargin != 2)
-    ## Find the first non-singleton dimension.
-    dim = find (sz > 1, 1);
-    if (isempty (dim))
-      dim = 1;
-    endif
-  else
-    if (!(isscalar (dim) && dim == fix (dim))
-        || !(1 <= dim && dim <= nd))
-      error ("studentize: DIM must be an integer and a valid dimension");
-    endif
-  endif
-
-  c = sz(dim);
-  if (c == 0)
-    t = x;
-  else
-    idx = ones (1, nd);
-    idx(dim) = c;
-    t = x - repmat (mean (x, dim), idx);
-    t = t ./ repmat (max (cat (dim, std(t, [], dim), ! any (t, dim)), [], dim), idx);
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
-
-%!assert(studentize ([1,2,3]), [-1,0,1])
-%!assert(studentize (int8 ([1,2,3])), [-1,0,1])
-#%!assert(studentize (ones (3,2,0,2)), zeros (3,2,0,2))
-%!assert(studentize ([2,0,-2;0,2,0;-2,-2,2]), [1,0,-1;0,1,0;-1,-1,1])
-
-%% Test input validation
-%!error studentize ()
-%!error studentize (1, 2, 3)
-%!error studentize ([true true])
-%!error studentize (1, ones(2,2))
-%!error studentize (1, 1.5)
-%!error studentize (1, 0)
-%!error studentize (1, 3)
-
--- a/scripts/deprecated/sylvester_matrix.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,70 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 1996-2013 John W. Eaton
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Function File} {} sylvester_matrix (@var{k})
-## Return the Sylvester matrix of order
-## @tex
-## $n = 2^k$.
-## @end tex
-## @ifnottex
-## n = 2^@var{k}.
-## @end ifnottex
-##
-## @seealso{toeplitz, hankel}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Author: jwe
-
-function retval = sylvester_matrix (k)
-
-  persistent warned = false;
-  if (! warned)
-    warned = true;
-    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
-             "sylvester_matrix is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Octave; please use hadamard(2^k) instead");
-  endif
-
-  if (nargin != 1)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  if (isscalar (k))
-    if (k < 1)
-      retval = 1;
-    else
-      tmp = sylvester_matrix (k-1);
-      retval = [tmp, tmp; tmp, -tmp];
-    endif
-  else
-    error ("sylvester_matrix: expecting scalar argument");
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
-
-%!assert((sylvester_matrix (1) == [1, 1; 1, -1]
-%! && (sylvester_matrix (2)
-%! == [1, 1, 1, 1; 1, -1, 1, -1; 1, 1, -1, -1; 1, -1, -1, 1])));
-
-%!error sylvester_matrix ([1, 2; 3, 4]);
-
-%!error sylvester_matrix ();
-
-%!error sylvester_matrix (1, 2);
-
--- a/scripts/general/isa.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
@@ -1,110 +0,0 @@
-## Copyright (C) 2004-2013 John W. Eaton
-##
-## This file is part of Octave.
-##
-## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
-## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
-## your option) any later version.
-##
-## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
-## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
-## General Public License for more details.
-##
-## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
-## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
-## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
-
-## -*- texinfo -*-
-## @deftypefn {Function File} {} isa (@var{obj}, @var{classname})
-## Return true if @var{obj} is an object from the class @var{classname}.
-##
-## @var{classname} may also be one of the following class categories: 
-##
-## @table @asis
-## @item @qcode{"float"}
-## Floating point value comprising classes @qcode{"double"} and
-## @qcode{"single"}.
-##
-## @item @qcode{"integer"}
-## Integer value comprising classes (u)int8, (u)int16, (u)int32, (u)int64.
-##
-## @item @qcode{"numeric"}
-## Numeric value comprising either a floating point or integer value.
-## @end table
-## @seealso{class, typeinfo}
-## @end deftypefn
-
-## Author: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle@users.sf.net>
-## Adapted-by: jwe
-
-function retval = isa (obj, classname)
-
-  if (nargin != 2)
-    print_usage ();
-  endif
-
-  if (strcmp (classname, "float"))
-    retval = isfloat (obj);
-  elseif (strcmp (classname, "integer"))
-    retval = isinteger (obj);
-  elseif (strcmp (classname, "numeric"))
-    retval = isnumeric (obj);
-  else
-    class_of_obj = class (obj);
-    retval = strcmp (class_of_obj, classname);
-    if (! retval && isobject (obj))
-      retval = __isa_parent__ (obj, classname);
-    endif
-  endif
-
-endfunction
-
-
-%!assert (isa ("char", "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (logical (1), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (double (13), "float"), true)
-%!assert (isa (single (13), "float"), true)
-%!assert (isa (int8 (13), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (int16 (13), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (int32 (13), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (int64 (13), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (uint8 (13), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (uint16 (13), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (uint32 (13), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa (uint64 (13), "float"), false)
-%!assert (isa ("char", "numeric"), false)
-%!assert (isa (logical (1), "numeric"), false)
-%!assert (isa (double (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (single (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (int8 (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (int16 (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (int32 (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (int64 (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (uint8 (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (uint16 (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (uint32 (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (uint64 (13), "numeric"), true)
-%!assert (isa (uint8 (13), "integer"), true)
-%!assert (isa (double (13), "integer"), false)
-%!assert (isa (single (13), "integer"), false)
-
-%!assert (isa (double (13), "double"))
-%!assert (isa (single (13), "single"))
-%!assert (isa (int8 (13), "int8"))
-%!assert (isa (int16 (13), "int16"))
-%!assert (isa (int32 (13), "int32"))
-%!assert (isa (int64 (13), "int64"))
-%!assert (isa (uint8 (13), "uint8"))
-%!assert (isa (uint16 (13), "uint16"))
-%!assert (isa (uint32 (13), "uint32"))
-%!assert (isa (uint64 (13), "uint64"))
-%!assert (isa ("string", "char"))
-%!assert (isa (true, "logical"))
-%!assert (isa (false, "logical"))
-%!assert (isa ({1, 2}, "cell"))
-%!test
-%! a.b = 1;
-%! assert (isa (a, "struct"));
-
--- a/scripts/general/module.mk	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/general/module.mk	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -40,7 +40,6 @@
   general/interp3.m \
   general/interpn.m \
   general/interpft.m \
-  general/isa.m \
   general/iscolumn.m \
   general/isdir.m \
   general/isequal.m \
@@ -82,6 +81,7 @@
   general/subsindex.m \
   general/triplequad.m \
   general/trapz.m \
+  general/validateattributes.m \
   $(general_PRIVATE_FCN_FILES)
 
 FCN_FILES += $(general_FCN_FILES)
--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/scripts/general/validateattributes.m	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -0,0 +1,430 @@
+## Copyright (C) 2013 Carnë Draug
+##
+## This file is part of Octave.
+##
+## Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
+## under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+## the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at
+## your option) any later version.
+##
+## Octave is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
+## WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+## MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
+## General Public License for more details.
+##
+## You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+## along with Octave; see the file COPYING.  If not, see
+## <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
+
+## -*- texinfo -*-
+## @deftypefn  {Function File} {} validateattributes (@var{A}, @var{classes}, @var{attributes})
+## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} validateattributes (@var{A}, @var{classes}, @var{attributes}, @var{arg_idx})
+## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} validateattributes (@var{A}, @var{classes}, @var{attributes}, @var{func_name})
+## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} validateattributes (@var{A}, @var{classes}, @var{attributes}, @var{func_name}, @var{arg_name})
+## @deftypefnx {Function File} {} validateattributes (@var{A}, @var{classes}, @var{attributes}, @var{func_name}, @var{arg_name}, @var{arg_idx})
+## Check validity of input argument.
+##
+## Confirms that the argument @var{A} is valid by belonging to one of
+## @var{classes}, and holding all of the @var{attributes}.  If it does not,
+## an error is thrown, with a message formatted accordingly.  The error
+## message can be made further complete by the function name @var{fun_name},
+## the argument name @var{arg_name}, and its position in the input
+## @var{arg_idx}.
+##
+## @var{classes} must be a cell array of strings (an empty cell array is
+## allowed) with the name of classes (remember that a class name is case
+## sensitive).  In addition to the class name, the following categories
+## names are also valid:
+##
+## @table @qcode
+## @item "float"
+## Floating point value comprising classes @qcode{"double"} and
+## @qcode{"single"}.
+##
+## @item "integer"
+## Integer value comprising classes (u)int8, (u)int16, (u)int32, (u)int64.
+##
+## @item "numeric"
+## Numeric value comprising either a floating point or integer value.
+##
+## @end table
+##
+## @var{attributes} must be a cell array with names of checks for @var{A}.
+## Some of them require an additional value to be supplied right after the
+## name (see details for each below).
+##
+## @table @qcode
+## @item "<="
+## All values are less than or equal to the following value in @var{attributes}.
+##
+## @item "<"
+## All values are less than the following value in @var{attributes}.
+##
+## @item ">="
+## All values are greater than or equal to the following value in @var{attributes}.
+##
+## @item ">"
+## All values are greater than the following value in @var{attributes}.
+##
+## @item "2d"
+## A 2 dimensional matrix.  Note that vectors and empty matrices have
+## 2 dimensions, one of them being of length 1, or both length 0.
+##
+## @item "3d"
+## Has no more than 3 dimensions.  A 2 dimensional matrix is a 3D matrix
+## whose 3rd dimension is of length 1.
+##
+## @item "binary"
+## All values are either 1 or 0.
+##
+## @item "column"
+## Values are arranged in a single column.
+##
+## @item "decreasing"
+## No value is @var{NaN}, and each is less than the preceding one.
+##
+## @item "even"
+## All values are even numbers.
+##
+## @item "finite"
+## All values are finite.
+##
+## @item "increasing"
+## No value is @var{NaN}, and each is greater than the preceding one.
+##
+## @item "integer"
+## All values are integer.  This is different than using @code{isinteger}
+## which only checks its an integer type.  This checks that each value in
+## @var{A} is an integer value, i.e., it has no decimal part.
+##
+## @item "ncols"
+## Has exactly as many columns as the next value in @var{attributes}.
+##
+## @item "ndims"
+## Has exactly as many dimensions as the next value in @var{attributes}.
+##
+## @item "nondecreasing"
+## No value is @var{NaN}, and each is greater than or equal to the preceding one.
+##
+## @item "nonempty"
+## It is not empty.
+##
+## @item "nonincreasing"
+## No value is @var{NaN}, and each is less than or equal to the preceding one.
+##
+## @item "nonnan"
+## No value is a @code{NaN}.
+##
+## @item "nonnegative"
+## All values are non negative.
+##
+## @item "nonsparse"
+## It is not a sparse matrix.
+##
+## @item "nonzero"
+## No value is zero.
+##
+## @item "nrows"
+## Has exactly as many rows as the next value in @var{attributes}.
+##
+## @item "numel"
+## Has exactly as many elements as the next value in @var{attributes}.
+##
+## @item "odd"
+## All values are odd numbers.
+##
+## @item "positive"
+## All values are positive.
+##
+## @item "real"
+## It is a non-complex matrix.
+##
+## @item "row"
+## Values are arranged in a single row.
+##
+## @item "scalar"
+## It is a scalar.
+##
+## @item "size",
+## Its size has length equal to the values of the next in @var{attributes}.
+## The next value must is an array with the length for each dimension.  To
+## ignore the check for a certain dimension, the value of @code{NaN} can be
+## used.
+##
+## @item "square"
+## Is a square matrix.
+##
+## @item "vector"
+## Values are arranged in a single vector (column or vector).
+##
+## @end table
+##
+## @seealso{nargin, varargin, isa, validatestring}
+## @end deftypefn
+
+function validateattributes (A, cls, attr, varargin)
+  if (nargin < 3 || nargin > 6)
+    print_usage ();
+  elseif (! iscellstr (cls))
+    error ("validateattributes: CLASSES must be a cell array of strings");
+  elseif (! iscell (attr))
+    error ("validateattributes: ATTRIBUTES must be a cell array");
+  endif
+
+  ## Built start of error message from the extra optional arguments
+  func_name = "";
+  var_name  = "input";
+  if (nargin > 3)
+    fourth = varargin{1};
+    if (ischar (fourth))
+      func_name = [fourth ": "];
+    elseif (nargin == 4 && valid_arg_idx (fourth))
+      var_name = sprintf ("input %d", fourth);
+    else
+      error ("validateattributes: 4th input argument must be ARG_IDX or FUNC_NAME");
+    endif
+
+    if (nargin > 4)
+      var_name = varargin{2};
+      if (! ischar (var_name))
+        error ("validateattributes: VAR_NAME must be a string");
+      endif
+
+      if (nargin > 5)
+        arg_idx = varargin{3};
+        if (! valid_arg_idx (arg_idx))
+          error ("validateattributes: ARG_IDX must be a positive integer");
+        endif
+        var_name = sprintf ("%s (argument #%i)", var_name, arg_idx);
+      endif
+    endif
+  endif
+  err_ini = [func_name var_name];
+
+  check_cl = isa (A, cls);
+  if (! isempty (check_cl) && ! any (check_cl))
+    ## Allowing for an empty list of classes is Matlab incompatible but
+    ## that should count as a just a Matlab bug, not an incompatibility.
+
+    ## Replace the category names with the classes that belong to it.
+    integer = { "int8"  "int16"  "int32"  "int64" ...
+               "uint8" "uint16" "uint32" "uint64"};
+    float   = {"single" "double"};
+    numeric = {integer{:} float{:}};
+    cls = replace_cl_group (cls, "integer", integer);
+    cls = replace_cl_group (cls, "float",   float  );
+    cls = replace_cl_group (cls, "numeric", numeric);
+    cls = unique (cls);
+
+    classes = sprintf (" %s", cls{:});
+    error ("%s must be of class:\n\n %s\n\nbut was of class %s",
+           err_ini, classes, class (A));
+  endif
+
+  ## We use a while loop because some attributes require the following value
+  ## in the cell array. Also, we can't just get the boolean value for the
+  ## test and check at the end the error message since some of the tests
+  ## require some more complex error message.
+
+  ## It may look like that we don't perform enough input check in this
+  ## function (e.g., we don't check if there's a value after the size
+  ## attribute). The reasoning is that this will be a function mostly used
+  ## by developers with fairly static input so any problem would be caught
+  ## immediately during that functino development, it's no dependent on the
+  ## final user input. In addition, it can be called so many times at the
+  ## start of every function, we want it to run specially fast.
+  idx = 1;
+  problem = false; # becomes true when one of the tests fails
+  while (idx <= numel (attr))
+    ## TODO: once we use this in Octave core, it might be worthy to find
+    ## which attributes are checked more often, and place them in that
+    ## order inside the switch block.
+    switch (tolower (attr{idx++}))
+      case "2d",            problem = ndims (A) != 2;
+      case "3d",            problem = ndims (A) > 3;
+      case "column",        problem = ! iscolumn (A);
+      case "row",           problem = ! isrow (A);
+      case "scalar",        problem = ! isscalar (A);
+      case "vector",        problem = ! isvector (A);
+      case "square",        problem = ! issquare (A);
+      case "nonempty",      problem = isempty (A);
+      case "nonsparse",     problem = issparse (A);
+      case "binary",        problem = ! islogical (A) && ...
+                                      any ((A(:) != 1) & (A(:) != 0));
+      case "even",          problem = any (rem (A(:), 2) != 0);
+      case "odd",           problem = any (mod (A(:), 2) != 1);
+      case "integer",       problem = ! isinteger (A) && ...
+                                      any (ceil (A(:)) != A(:));
+      case "real",          problem = ! isreal (A);
+      case "finite",        problem = ! isinteger (A) && ...
+                                      ! all (isfinite (A(:)));
+      case "nonnan",        problem = ! isinteger (A) && ...
+                                      any (isnan (A(:)));
+      case "nonnegative",   problem = any (A(:) < 0);
+      case "nonzero",       problem = any (A(:) == 0);
+      case "positive",      problem = any (A(:) <= 0);
+      case "decreasing",    problem = (any (isnan (A(:))) ||
+                                       any (diff (A(:)) >= 0));
+      case "increasing",    problem = (any (isnan (A(:))) ||
+                                       any (diff (A(:)) <= 0));
+      case "nondecreasing", problem = (any (isnan (A(:))) ||
+                                       any (diff (A(:)) <  0));
+      case "nonincreasing", problem = (any (isnan (A(:))) ||
+                                       any (diff (A(:)) >  0));
+      case "size",
+        A_size = size (A);
+        w_size = attr{idx++};
+        A_size(isnan (w_size)) = NaN;
+        if (! isequaln (A_size, w_size))
+          A_size_str = sprintf ("%dx", size (A))(1:end-1);
+          w_size_str = sprintf ("%ix", w_size)(1:end-1);
+          w_size_str = strrep (w_size_str, "NaN", "N");
+          error ("%s must be of size %s but was %s", err_ini, w_size_str, A_size_str);
+        endif
+      case "numel",
+        if (numel (A) != attr{idx++})
+          error ("%s must have %d elements", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+        endif
+      case "ncols",
+        if (columns (A) != attr{idx++})
+          error ("%s must have %d columns", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+        endif
+      case "nrows",
+        if (rows (A) != attr{idx++})
+          error ("%s must have %d rows", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+        endif
+      case "ndims",
+        ## Note that a [4 5 1] matrix is not considered to have ndims == 3
+        ## but is ok for "3d". This is not a bug.
+        if (ndims (A) != attr{idx++})
+          error ("%s must have %d dimensions", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+        endif
+      case ">"
+        if (! all (A(:) > attr{idx++}))
+          error ("%s must be greater than %f", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+        endif
+      case ">="
+        if (! all (A(:) >= attr{idx++}))
+          error ("%s must be greater than or equal to %f", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+        endif
+      case "<"
+        if (! all (A(:) < attr{idx++}))
+          error ("%s must be less than %f", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+        endif
+      case "<="
+        if (! all (A(:) <= attr{idx++}))
+          error ("%s must be less than or equal to %f", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+        endif
+      otherwise
+        error ("validateattributes: unknown ATTRIBUTE %s", attr{idx-1});
+    endswitch
+    if (problem)
+      error ("%s must be %s", err_ini, attr{idx-1});
+    endif
+  endwhile
+endfunction
+
+function retval = valid_arg_idx (arg)
+  retval = isnumeric (arg) && isscalar (arg) && arg > 0 && ceil (arg) == arg;
+endfunction
+
+function cls = replace_cl_group (cls, name, group)
+  num_pos = strcmpi (cls, name);
+  if (any (num_pos))
+    cls(num_pos) = [];
+    cls(end+1:end+numel(group)) = group;
+  endif
+endfunction
+
+%!error <double> validateattributes (rand (5), {"uint8"}, {})
+%!error <single> validateattributes (uint8 (rand (5)), {"float"}, {})
+%!error <2d> validateattributes (rand (5, 5, 5), {}, {"2d"})
+%!error <3d> validateattributes (rand (5, 5, 5, 7), {}, {"3d"})
+%!error <column> validateattributes (rand (5, 5), {}, {"column"})
+%!error <column> validateattributes (rand (1, 5), {}, {"column"})
+%!error <row> validateattributes (rand (5, 5), {}, {"row"})
+%!error <row> validateattributes (rand (5, 1), {}, {"row"})
+%!error <scalar> validateattributes (rand (1, 5), {}, {"scalar"})
+%!error <vector> validateattributes (rand (5), {}, {"vector"})
+%!error <square> validateattributes (rand (5, 6), {}, {"square"})
+%!error <nonempty> validateattributes ([], {}, {"nonempty"})
+%!error <nonsparse> validateattributes (sparse(rand(5)), {}, {"nonsparse"})
+%!error <binary> validateattributes ("text", {}, {"binary"})
+%!error <binary> validateattributes ([0 1 0 3 0], {}, {"binary"})
+%!error <even> validateattributes ([2 3 6 8], {}, {"even"})
+%!error <even> validateattributes ([2 NaN], {}, {"even"})
+%!error <odd> validateattributes ([3 4 7 5], {}, {"odd"})
+%!error <odd> validateattributes ([5 NaN], {}, {"odd"})
+%!error <integer> validateattributes ([5 5.2 5.7], {}, {"integer"})
+%!error <real> validateattributes ([5i 8 9], {}, {"real"})
+%!error <finite> validateattributes ([5i Inf 8], {}, {"finite"})
+%!error <nonnan> validateattributes ([NaN Inf 8], {}, {"nonnan"})
+%!error <nonnegative> validateattributes ([7 8 -9], {}, {"nonnegative"})
+%!error <nonzero> validateattributes ([7 8 0], {}, {"nonzero"})
+%!error <positive> validateattributes ([7 0 8], {}, {"positive"})
+%!error <decreasing> validateattributes ([7 8 4 3 -5], {}, {"decreasing"})
+%!error <decreasing> validateattributes ([7 NaN 4 3 -5], {}, {"decreasing"})
+%!error <increasing> validateattributes ([7 8 4 9 20], {}, {"increasing"})
+%!error <increasing> validateattributes ([7 8 NaN 9 20], {}, {"increasing"})
+%!error <nonincreasing> validateattributes ([7 8 4 9 20], {}, {"nonincreasing"})
+%!error <nonincreasing> validateattributes ([7 8 NaN 9 20], {}, {"nonincreasing"})
+%!error <nondecreasing> validateattributes ([7 8 4 3 -5], {}, {"nondecreasing"})
+%!error <nondecreasing> validateattributes ([7 NaN 4 3 -5], {}, {"nondecreasing"})
+%!error <size> validateattributes (ones (5, 3, 6), {}, {"size", [5 4 7]})
+%!error <size> validateattributes (ones (5, 3, 6), {}, {"size", [5 NaN 7]})
+%!error <size> validateattributes (ones (5, 3, 6), {}, {"size", [5 3 6 2]})
+%!error <elements> validateattributes (ones (6, 3), {}, {"numel", 12})
+%!error <columns> validateattributes (ones (6, 2), {}, {"ncols", 3})
+%!error <rows> validateattributes (ones (6, 2), {}, {"nrows", 3})
+%!error <dimensions> validateattributes (ones (6, 2, 6, 3), {}, {"ndims", 3})
+%!error <greater than> validateattributes ([6 7 8 5], {}, {">", 5})
+%!error <greater than> validateattributes ([6 7 8 5], {}, {">=", 6})
+%!error <less than> validateattributes ([6 7 8 5], {}, {"<", 8})
+%!error <less than> validateattributes ([6 7 8 5], {}, {"<=", 7})
+
+%!test
+%! validateattributes (rand (5), {"numeric"}, {})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5), {"float"}, {})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5), {"double"}, {})
+%! validateattributes ("text", {"char"}, {})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5), {}, {"2d"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5), {}, {"3d"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5, 5, 5), {}, {"3d"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5, 1), {}, {"column"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (1, 5), {}, {"row"})
+%! validateattributes ("a", {}, {"scalar"})
+%! validateattributes (5, {}, {"scalar"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (1, 5), {}, {"vector"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5, 1), {}, {"vector"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5), {}, {"square"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5), {}, {"nonempty"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5), {}, {"nonsparse"})
+%! validateattributes ([0 1 0 1 0], {}, {"binary"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (5) > 0.5, {}, {"binary"})
+%! validateattributes ([8 4 0 6], {}, {"even"})
+%! validateattributes ([-1 3 5], {}, {"odd"})
+%! validateattributes ([8 4 0 6], {}, {"real"})
+%! validateattributes ([8 4i 0 6], {}, {"finite"})
+%! validateattributes (uint8 ([8 4]), {}, {"finite"})
+%! validateattributes ([8 Inf], {}, {"nonnan"})
+%! validateattributes ([0 7 4], {}, {"nonnegative"})
+%! validateattributes ([-8 7 4], {}, {"nonzero"})
+%! validateattributes ([8 7 4], {}, {"positive"})
+%! validateattributes ([8 7 4 -5], {}, {"decreasing"})
+%! validateattributes ([-8 -7 4 5], {}, {"increasing"})
+%! validateattributes ([8 4 4 -5], {}, {"nonincreasing"})
+%! validateattributes ([-8 -8 4 5], {}, {"nondecreasing"})
+%! validateattributes (rand (4, 6, 7, 2), {}, {"size", [4 6 7 2]})
+%! validateattributes (rand (4, 6, 7, 2), {}, {"size", [4 NaN 7 2]})
+%! validateattributes (rand (4, 6, 7, 2), {}, {"size", [4 6 NaN 2 NaN]})
+%! validateattributes (rand (6, 2), {}, {"numel", 12})
+%! validateattributes (rand (6, 2), {}, {"ncols", 2})
+%! validateattributes (rand (6, 2), {}, {"nrows", 6})
+%! validateattributes (rand (6, 2, 4, 5), {}, {"ndims", 4})
+%! validateattributes ([4 5 6 7], {}, {">", 3})
+%! validateattributes ([4 5 6 7], {}, {">=", 4})
+%! validateattributes ([4 5 6 7], {}, {"<", 8})
+%! validateattributes ([4 5 6 7], {}, {"<=", 7})
+
+%!test
+%! validateattributes ([0 1 0 1], {"double", "uint8"}, {"binary", "size", [NaN 4], "nonnan"})
--- a/scripts/help/__unimplemented__.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/help/__unimplemented__.m	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -822,7 +822,6 @@
   "unloadlibrary",
   "unmesh",
   "userpath",
-  "validateattributes",
   "verctrl",
   "verLessThan",
   "viewmtx",
--- a/scripts/miscellaneous/edit.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/miscellaneous/edit.m	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -284,7 +284,7 @@
     endif
 
     ## If the file includes a path, it may be an overloaded function.
-    if (! index (file, "@") && index (file, filesep))
+    if (! index (file, "@") && strchr (file, '/\'))
       ## No "@" at the beginning of the file, add to the list.
       numfiles = numel (filelist);
       for n = 1:numfiles
--- a/scripts/miscellaneous/ls.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/miscellaneous/ls.m	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -63,6 +63,10 @@
     if (ispc () && ! isunix ())
       ## shell (cmd.exe) on MinGW uses '^' as escape character
       args = regexprep (args, '([^\w.*? -])', '^$1');
+      ## Strip UNIX directory character which looks like an option to dir cmd.
+      if (args{end}(end) == '/')
+        args{end}(end) = "";
+      endif
     else
       args = regexprep (args, '([^\w.*? -])', '\\$1');
     endif
--- a/scripts/miscellaneous/what.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/miscellaneous/what.m	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -30,17 +30,19 @@
 
   if (nargin == 0)
     d = pwd ();
-  elseif (isempty (strfind (d, filesep ())))
-    ## Find the appropriate directory on the path.
-    p = strtrim (ostrsplit (path (), pathsep ()));
-    d = p{find (cellfun (@(x) ! isempty (strfind (x, d)), p))(end)};
   else
-    [status, msg, msgid] = fileattrib (d);
-    if (status != 1)
-      error ("what: could not find the file or path %s", d);
-    else
-      d = msg.Name;
+    dtmp = canonicalize_file_name (d);
+    if (isempty (dtmp))
+      ## Search for directory name in path
+      if (d(end) == '/' || d(end) == '\')
+        d(end) = [];
+      endif
+      dtmp = find_dir_in_path (d);
+      if (isempty (dtmp))
+        error ("what: could not find the directory %s", d);
+      endif
     endif
+    d = dtmp;
   endif
 
   files = dir (d);
@@ -60,7 +62,7 @@
       continue;
     else
       ## Ignore mdl and p files
-      [dummy, f, e] = fileparts (n);
+      [~, f, e] = fileparts (n);
       if (strcmp (e, ".m"))
         w.m{end+1} = n;
       elseif (strcmp (e, ".oct"))
--- a/scripts/plot/draw/fill.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/plot/draw/fill.m	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -94,15 +94,8 @@
       for i = 1 : length (iargs)
         cdata = varargin{iargs(i) + 2};
 
-        ## Matlab uses flat/interp shading based on orientation of cdata.
-        if (isnumeric (cdata) && isrow (cdata))
-          popt = ["facecolor", "flat", opts];
-        else
-          popt = opts;
-        endif
-
         [htmp, fail] = __patch__ (hax, varargin{iargs(i)+(0:1)}, cdata,
-                                       popt{:});
+                                       opts{:});
         if (fail)
           print_usage ();
         endif
@@ -145,7 +138,7 @@
     endif
   elseif (isnumeric (arg))
     ## Assume any numeric argument is correctly formatted cdata.
-    ## Let patch worry about the multple different input formats
+    ## Let patch worry about the multple different input formats.
     retval = true;
   endif
 endfunction
--- a/scripts/testfun/rundemos.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/testfun/rundemos.m	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -36,20 +36,17 @@
     dirs = ostrsplit (path (), pathsep ());
     do_class_dirs = true;
   elseif (nargin == 1)
-    if (is_absolute_filename (directory))
-      dirs = {directory};
-    elseif (is_rooted_relative_filename (directory))
-      dirs = {canonicalize_file_name(directory)};
-    else
-      if (directory(end) == filesep ())
-        directory = directory(1:end-1);
+    dirs = {canonicalize_file_name(directory)};
+    if (isempty (dirs{1}))
+      ## Search for directory name in path
+      if (directory(end) == '/' || directory(end) == '\')
+        directory(end) = [];
       endif
       fullname = find_dir_in_path (directory);
-      if (! isempty (fullname))
-        dirs = {fullname};
-      else
+      if (isempty (fullname))
         error ("rundemos: DIRECTORY argument must be a valid pathname");
       endif
+      dirs = {fullname};
     endif
     do_class_dirs = false;
   else
--- a/scripts/testfun/runtests.m	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/scripts/testfun/runtests.m	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -36,20 +36,17 @@
     dirs = ostrsplit (path (), pathsep ());
     do_class_dirs = true;
   elseif (nargin == 1)
-    if (is_absolute_filename (directory))
-      dirs = {directory};
-    elseif (is_rooted_relative_filename (directory))
-      dirs = {canonicalize_file_name(directory)};
-    else
-      if (directory(end) == filesep ())
-        directory = directory(1:end-1);
+    dirs = {canonicalize_file_name(directory)};
+    if (isempty (dirs{1}))
+      ## Search for directory name in path
+      if (directory(end) == '/' || directory(end) == '\')
+        directory(end) = [];
       endif
       fullname = find_dir_in_path (directory);
-      if (! isempty (fullname))
-        dirs = {fullname};
-      else
+      if (isempty (fullname))
         error ("runtests: DIRECTORY argument must be a valid pathname");
       endif
+      dirs = {fullname};
     endif
     do_class_dirs = false;
   else
@@ -127,7 +124,7 @@
   if (fid >= 0)
     str = fread (fid, "*char").';
     fclose (fid);
-    retval = ! isempty (regexp (str, '^%!(?:test|assert|error|warning)',
+    retval = ! isempty (regexp (str, '^%!(?:test|xtest|assert|error|warning)',
                                      'lineanchors', 'once'));
   else
     error ("runtests: fopen failed: %s", f);
--- a/src/main.in.cc	Tue Dec 03 22:32:52 2013 +0100
+++ b/src/main.in.cc	Tue Dec 03 16:06:46 2013 -0800
@@ -585,12 +585,18 @@
 {
   int retval = 0;
 
-  bool start_gui = false;
-  bool gui_libs = false;
+  bool start_gui = true;
+  bool gui_libs = true;
 
   std::string octave_bindir = get_octave_bindir ();
 
-  std::string file = octave_bindir + dir_sep_char + "octave-cli";
+  std::string file = octave_bindir + dir_sep_char;
+
+#if defined (HAVE_OCTAVE_GUI)
+  file += "octave-gui";
+#else
+  file += "octave-cli";
+#endif
 
   char **new_argv = new char * [argc + 1];
 
@@ -605,19 +611,7 @@
 
   for (int i = 1; i < argc; i++)
     {
-      if (! strcmp (argv[i], "--force-gui"))
-        {
-          start_gui = true;
-          gui_libs = true;
-          file = octave_bindir + dir_sep_char;
-          #if defined (HAVE_OCTAVE_GUI)
-            file += "octave-gui";
-          #else
-            file += "octave-cli";
-          #endif
-          new_argv[k++] = argv[i];
-        }
-      else if (! strcmp (argv[i], "--no-gui-libs"))
+      if (! strcmp (argv[i], "--no-gui-libs"))
         {
           // Run the version of Octave that is not linked with any GUI
           // libraries.  It may not be possible to do plotting or any
@@ -625,7 +619,9 @@
           // require less memory.  Don't pass the --no-gui-libs option
           // on as that option is not recognized by Octave.
 
-          // This is the default for 3.8 release.
+          start_gui = false;
+          gui_libs = false;
+          file = octave_bindir + dir_sep_char + "octave-cli";
         }
       else if (! strcmp (argv[i], "--no-gui"))
         {
@@ -635,10 +631,11 @@
           // if the --no-gui option is given, we may be asked to do some
           // plotting or ui* calls.
 
-          // This option calls the cli executable for the 3.8 release.
+          start_gui = false;
+          new_argv[k++] = argv[i];
         }
-      else if (! strcmp (argv[i], "--silent") || ! strcmp (argv[i], "-q")
-               || ! strcmp (argv[i], "--quiet"))
+      else if (! strcmp (argv[i], "--silent") || ! strcmp (argv[i], "--quiet")
+               || ! strcmp (argv[i], "-q"))
         {
           warn_display = false;
           new_argv[k++] = argv[i];