June 5, 2009
News for version 9 8 7 6 5 4.4 4.2 4 3.8 3.6 3.4 3.2 3 2 1 (Release History)
** Compatibility with Matlab graphics has been improved.
The hggroup object and associated listener callback functions have
been added allowing the inclusion of group objects. Data sources
have been added to these group objects such that
x = 0:0.1:10;
y = sin (x);
plot (x, y, "ydatasource", "y");
for i = 1 : 100
pause(0.1)
y = sin (x + 0.1 * i);
refreshdata();
endfor
works as expected. This capability has be used to introduce
stem-series, bar-series, etc., objects for better Matlab
compatibility.
** New graphics functions:
addlistener ezcontour gcbo refresh
addproperty ezcontourf ginput refreshdata
allchild ezmesh gtext specular
available_backends ezmeshc intwarning surfl
backend ezplot ishghandle trisurf
cla ezplot3 isocolors waitforbuttonpress
clabel ezpolar isonormals
comet ezsurf isosurface
dellistener findall linkprop
diffuse gcbf plotmatrix
** New experimental OpenGL/FLTK based plotting system.
An experimental plotting system based on OpenGL and the FLTK
toolkit is now part of Octave. This backend is disabled by
default. You can switch to using it with the command
backend ("fltk")
for all future figures or for a particular figure with the command
backend (h, "fltk")
where "h" is a valid figure handle. Please note that this backend
does not yet support text objects. Obviously, this is a necessary
feature before it can be considered usable. We are looking for
volunteers to help implement this missing feature.
** Functions providing direct access to gnuplot have been removed.
The functions __gnuplot_plot__, __gnuplot_set__, __gnuplot_raw__,
__gnuplot_show__, __gnuplot_replot__, __gnuplot_splot__,
__gnuplot_save_data__ and __gnuplot_send_inline_data__ have been
removed from Octave. These function were incompatible with the
high level graphics handle code.
** The Control, Finance and Quaternion functions have been removed.
These functions are now available as separate packages from
http://octave.sourceforge.net/packages.html
and can be reinstalled using the Octave package manager (see
the pkg function).
** Specific sparse matrix functions removed.
The following functions, which handled only sparse matrices have
been removed. Instead of calling these functions directly, you
should use the corresponding function without the "sp" prefix.
spatan2 spcumsum spkron spprod
spchol spdet splchol spqr
spchol2inv spdiag splu spsum
spcholinv spfind spmax spsumsqk
spcumprod spinv spmin
** Improvements to the debugger.
The interactive debugging features have been improved. Stopping
on statements with dbstop should work correctly now. Stepping
into and over functions, and stepping one statement at a time
(with dbstep) now works. Moving up and down the call stack with
dbup and dbdown now works. The dbstack function is now available
to print the current function call stack. The new dbquit function
is available to exit the debugging mode.
** Improved traceback error messages.
Traceback error messages are much more concise and easier to
understand. They now display information about the function call
stack instead of the stack of all statements that were active at
the point of the error.
** Object Oriented Programming.
Octave now includes OOP features and the user can create their own
class objects and overloaded functions and operators. For
example, all methods of a class called "myclass" will be found in
a directory "@myclass" on the users path. The class specific
versions of functions and operators take precedence over the
generic versions of these functions.
New functions related to OOP include
class inferiorto isobject loadobj methods superiorto
See the Octave manual for more details.
** Parsing of Command-style Functions.
Octave now parses command-style functions without needing to first
declare them with "mark_as_command". The rules for recognizing a
command-style function calls are
* A command must appear as the first word in a statement,
followed by a space.
* The first character after the space must not be '=' or '('
* The next token after the space must not look like a binary
operator.
These rules should be mostly compatible with the way Matlab parses
command-style function calls and allow users to define commands in
.m files without having to mark them as commands.
Note that previous versions of Octave allowed expressions like
x = load -text foo.dat
but an expression like this will now generate a parse error. In
order to assign the value returned by a function to a variable,
you must use the normal function call syntax:
x = load ("-text", "foo.dat");
** Block comments.
Commented code can be between matching "#{" and "#}" or "%{" and
"%}" markers, even if the commented code spans several line. This
allows blocks code to be commented, without needing to comment
each line. For example,
function [s, t] = func (x, y)
s = 2 * x;
#{
s *= y;
t = y + x;
#}
endfunction
the lines "s *= y;" and "t = y + x" will not be executed.
** Special treatment in the parser of expressions like "a' * b".
In these cases the transpose is no longer explicitly formed and
BLAS libraries are called with the transpose flagged,
significantly improving performance for these kinds of
operations.
** Single Precision data type.
Octave now includes a single precision data type. Single
precision variables can be created with the "single" command, or
from functions like ones, eye, etc. For example,
single (1)
ones (2, 2, "single")
zeros (2, 2, "single")
eye (2, 2, "single")
Inf (2, 2, "single")
NaN (2, 2, "single")
NA (2, 2, "single")
all create single precision variables. For compatibility with
Matlab, mixed double/single precision operators and functions
return single precision types.
As a consequence of this addition to Octave the internal
representation of the double precision NA value has changed, and
so users that make use of data generated by Octave with R or
visa-versa are warned that compatibility might not be assured.
** Improved array indexing.
The underlying code used for indexing of arrays has been
completely rewritten and indexing is now significantly faster.
** Improved memory management.
Octave will now attempt to share data in some cases where previously
a copy would be made, such as certain array slicing operations or
conversions between cells, structs and cs-lists. This usually reduces
both time and memory consumption.
Also, Octave will now attempt to detect and optimize usage of a vector
as a stack, when elements are being repeatedly inserted at/removed from
the end of the vector.
** Improved performance for reduction operations.
The performance of the sum, prod, sumsq, cumsum, cumprod, any, all,
max and min functions has been significantly improved.
** Sorting and searching.
The performance of sort has been improved, especially when sorting
indices are requested. An efficient built-in issorted implementation
was added. sortrows now uses a more efficient algorithm, especially
in the homegeneous case. lookup is now a built-in function performing
a binary search, optimized for long runs of close elements. Lookup
also works with cell arrays of strings.
** Range arithmetics
For some operations on ranges, Octave will attempt to keep the result as a
range. These include negation, adding a scalar, subtracting a scalar, and
multiplying by a scalar. Ranges with zero increment are allowed and can be
constructed using the built-in function `ones'.
** Various performance improvements.
Performance of a number of other built-in operations and functions was
improved, including:
* logical operations
* comparison operators
* element-wise power
* accumarray
* cellfun
* isnan
* isinf
* isfinite
* nchoosek
* repmat
* strcmp
** 64-bit integer arithmetic.
Arithmetic with 64-bit integers (int64 and uint64 types) is fully
supported, with saturation semantics like the other integer types.
Performance of most integer arithmetic operations has been
improved by using integer arithmetic directly. Previously, Octave
performed integer math with saturation semantics by converting the
operands to double precision, performing the operation, and then
converting the result back to an integer value, truncating if
necessary.
** Diagonal and permutation matrices.
The interpreter can now treat diagonal and permutation matrices as
special objects that store only the non-zero elements, rather than
general full matrices. Therefore, it is now possible to construct
and use these matrices in linear algebra without suffering a
performance penalty due to storing large numbers of zero elements.
** Improvements to fsolve.
The fsolve function now accepts an option structure argument (see
also the optimset function). The INFO values returned from fsolve
have changed to be compatible with Matlab's fsolve function.
Additionally, fsolve is now able to solve overdetermined systems,
complex-differentiable complex systems, systems with a sparse
jacobian and can work in single precision if given single precision
inputs. It can also be called recursively.
** Improvements to the norm function.
The norm function is now able to compute row or column norms of a
matrix in a single call, as well as general matrix p-norms.
** New functions for computing some eigenvalues or singular values.
The eigs and svds functions have been included in Octave. These
functions require the ARPACK library (now distributed under a
GPL-compatible license).
** New QR and Cholesky factorization updating functions.
choldelete cholshift qrdelete qrshift
cholinsert cholupdate qrinsert qrupdate
** New quadrature functions.
dblquad quadgk quadv triplequad
** New functions for reading and writing images.
The imwrite and imread functions have been included in Octave.
These functions require the GraphicsMagick library. The new
function imfinfo provides information about an image file (size,
type, colors, etc.)
** The input_event_hook function has been replaced by the pair of
functions add_input_event_hook and remove_input_event_hook so that
more than one hook function may be installed at a time.
** Other miscellaneous new functions.
addtodate hypot reallog
bicgstab idivide realpow
cellslices info realsqrt
cgs interp1q rectint
command_line_path isdebugmode regexptranslate
contrast isfloat restoredefaultpath
convn isstrprop roundb
cummin log1p rundemos
cummax lsqnonneg runlength
datetick matlabroot saveobj
display namelengthmax spaugment
expm1 nargoutchk strchr
filemarker pathdef strvcat
fstat perl subspace
full prctile symvar
fzero quantile treelayout
genvarname re_read_readline_init_file validatestring
histc
** Changes to strcat.
The strcat function is now compatible with Matlab's strcat
function, which removes trailing whitespace when concatenating
character strings. For example
strcat ('foo ', 'bar')
==> 'foobar'
The new function cstrcat provides the previous behavior of
Octave's strcat.
** Improvements to the help functions.
The help system has been mostly re-implemented in .m files to make
it easier to modify. Performance of the lookfor function has been
greatly improved by caching the help text from all functions that
are distributed with Octave. The pkg function has been modified
to generate cache files for external packages when they are
installed.
** Deprecated functions.
The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.0 and will be
removed in Octave 3.4 (or whatever version is the second major
release after 3.0):
beta_cdf geometric_pdf pascal_pdf
beta_inv geometric_rnd pascal_rnd
beta_pdf hypergeometric_cdf poisson_cdf
beta_rnd hypergeometric_inv poisson_inv
binomial_cdf hypergeometric_pdf poisson_pdf
binomial_inv hypergeometric_rnd poisson_rnd
binomial_pdf intersection polyinteg
binomial_rnd is_bool setstr
chisquare_cdf is_complex struct_contains
chisquare_inv is_list struct_elements
chisquare_pdf is_matrix t_cdf
chisquare_rnd is_scalar t_inv
clearplot is_square t_pdf
clg is_stream t_rnd
com2str is_struct uniform_cdf
exponential_cdf is_symmetric uniform_inv
exponential_inv is_vector uniform_pdf
exponential_pdf isstr uniform_rnd
exponential_rnd lognormal_cdf weibcdf
f_cdf lognormal_inv weibinv
f_inv lognormal_pdf weibpdf
f_pdf lognormal_rnd weibrnd
f_rnd meshdom weibull_cdf
gamma_cdf normal_cdf weibull_inv
gamma_inv normal_inv weibull_pdf
gamma_pdf normal_pdf weibull_rnd
gamma_rnd normal_rnd wiener_rnd
geometric_cdf pascal_cdf
geometric_inv pascal_inv
The following functions are now deprecated in Octave 3.2 and will
be removed in Octave 3.6 (or whatever version is the second major
release after 3.2):
create_set spcholinv spmax
dmult spcumprod spmin
iscommand spcumsum spprod
israwcommand spdet spqr
lchol spdiag spsum
loadimage spfind spsumsq
mark_as_command spinv str2mat
mark_as_rawcommand spkron unmark_command
spatan2 splchol unmark_rawcommand
spchol split
spchol2inv splu
See NEWS.3 for old news.