web-octave: pages/NEWS-3.4.md comparison

comparison pages/NEWS-3.4.md @ 215:dedb85c54245

Reorganize homepage.

author	Kai T. Ohlhus <k.ohlhus@gmail.com>
date	Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:47:36 +0900
parents
children	c8126c010d67

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+---
+layout: page
+title: GNU Octave Version 3.4
+menu: false
+permalink: NEWS-3.4.html
+---
+## Summary of important user-visible changes
+February 8, 2011
+{% include release_news_select.md %}
+<pre>
+** 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+** ChangeLog files in the Octave sources are no longer maintained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 `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 expresssion.
+** 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 wrapping the
+operands in real().
+** 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.
+** 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.
+** 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     krylovb    values
+autocov  dispatch  glpkmex    replot
+betai    fstat     is_global  saveimage
+* For compatibility with Matlab, mu2lin (x) is now equivalent to
+mu2lin (x, 0).
+* The ARPACK library is now distributed with Octave so it no longer
+needs to be available as an external dependency when building
+Octave.
+</pre>

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comparison pages/NEWS-3.4.md @ 215:dedb85c54245