November 13, 2016
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)
** The parser has been extended to accept, but ignore, underscore
characters in numbers. This facilitates writing more legible code
by using '_' as a thousands separator or to group nibbles into bytes
in hex constants.
Examples: 1_000_000 == 1e6 or 0xDE_AD_BE_EF
** The parser has been extended to understand binary numbers which
begin with the prefix '0b' or '0B'. The value returned is Octave's
default numeric class of double, not at unsigned integer class.
Therefore numbers greater than flintmax, i.e., 2^53, will lose some
precision.
Examples: 0b101 == 5 or 0B1100_0001 == 0xC1
** gnuplot 4.4 is now the minimum version supported by Octave.
** The default set of colors used to plot lines has been updated to be
compatible with Matlab's new default color scheme. The line plot
color scheme can be set with the axes property "ColorOrder".
** The default colormap is now set to "viridis" which is also the
default colormap in matplotlib. This new colormap fixes some of the
main issues with the old default colormap "jet" such as its bad
"luminance profile" and is also more similar to Matlab's new default
colormap "parula".
** The colormap function no longer supports the input argument "list"
to show built-in colormaps. Use "help colormap" to find the
built-in colormaps.
** The graphics command "hold on" now ensures that each new plot added
to an existing plot has a different color or linestyle according to
the "ColorOrder" and/or "LineStyleOrder" properties. This is
equivalent to the old command "hold all" and was made for Matlab
compatibility. Existing code *may* produce differently colored
plots if it did not specify the color for a plot and relied on each
new plot having the default first color in the "ColorOrder"
property.
** When starting, Octave now looks in the function path for a file
startup.m and executes any commands found there. This change was
made to accommodate Matlab users. Octave has it's own configuration
system based on the file .octaverc which is preferred.
** Octal ('\NNN') and hex ('\xNN') escape sequences in single quoted
strings are now interpreted by the function do_string_escapes().
The *printf family of functions now supports octal and hex escape
sequences in single-quoted strings for Matlab compatibility.
** Special octal and hex escape sequences for the pattern and
replacement strings in regular expressions are now interpreted for
Matlab compatibility.
octal: '\oNNN' or '\o{NNN}'
hex : '\xNN' or '\x{NN}'
** Unknown escape sequences in the replacement string for regexprep are
now substituted with their unescaped version and no warning is
emitted. This change was made for Matlab compatibility.
Example: regexprep ('a', 'a', 'x\yz')
=> 'xyz'
** mkfifo now interprets the MODE argument as an octal, not decimal,
integer. This is consistent with the equivalent shell command.
** linspace now returns an empty matrix if the number of requested
points is 0 or a negative number. This change was made to be
compatible with Matlab releases newer than 2011. In addition,
Octave no longer supports matrix inputs for A or B.
** The cov function now returns the complex conjugate of the result
from previous versions of Octave. This change was made for
compatibility with Matlab.
** condest now works with a normest1 compatible syntax.
** The griddata function no longer plots the interpolated mesh if no
output argument is requested, instead the vector or array of
interpolated values is always returned for Matlab compatibility.
** The new function "light" and the corresponding graphics object
provide light and shadow effects for patch and surface objects.
** The surfnorm function now returns unnormalized (magnitude != 1)
normal vectors for compatibility with Matlab.
** The normal vectors returned from isonormals have been reversed to
point towards smaller values for compatibility with Matlab.
** The quadl function now uses an absolute, rather than relative,
tolerance for Matlab compatibility. The default tolerance is 1e-6
which may result in lower precision results than previous versions
of Octave which used eps as the relative tolerance. The quadl
function has also been extended to return a second output with the
total number of function evaluations.
** The textscan function is now built-in and is much faster and much
more Matlab-compatible than the previous m-file version.
** Dialog boxes--errordlg, helpdlg, inputdlg, listdlg, msgbox,
questdlg, and warndlg--now exclusively use Qt for rendering.
Java based versions have been removed.
** The axes properties "TitleFontSizeMultiplier" and "TitleFontWeight"
are now implemented which control the default appearance of text
created with title().
The axes property "LabelFontSizeMultiplier" is now implemented
which controls the default appearance of text created with
xlabel(), ylabel(), or zlabel().
** The graphics property "box" for axes now defaults to "off".
To obtain equivalent plots to previous versions of Octave use
set (0, "DefaultAxesBox", "on");
in your .octaverc file.
** The graphics property "boxstyle" has been implemented. The default
is "back" which draws only the back planes in a 3-D view. If the
option is "full" then all planes are drawn.
** The graphics property "erasemode" has been hidden, and will
eventually be removed. This property has also been removed
from Matlab, and was never implemented in Octave.
** The graphics property "graphicssmoothing" for figures now controls
whether anti-aliasing will be used for lines. The default is "on".
** The value "zero" for the axes properties "xaxislocation" and
"yaxislocation" has been deprecated and will be removed from
Octave 4.6. Use "origin" instead.
** The publish function allows easy publication of Octave script files
in HTML or other formats, including figures and output created by
this script. It comes with its counterpart grabcode, which lets one
literally grab the HTML published code from a remote website, for
example.
** The value of the MEX variable TrapFlag now defaults to 0, which will
cause Octave to abort execution of a MEX file and return to the
prompt if an error is encountered in mexCallMATLAB.
** The MEX API now includes the function mexCallMATLABWithTrap. This
function will not abort if an error occurs during mexCallMATLAB, but
instead will return execution to the MEX function for error
handling.
** The MEX API functions for input validation that begin with "mxIs"
(e.g., mxIsDouble, mxIsEmpty, etc.) now return type bool rather than
type int.
** The functions mxAssert and mxAssertS for checking assertions have
been added. In order to avoid a performance penalty they are only
compiled in to debug versions of a MEX file, i.e., that are produced
when the '-g' option is given to mex or mkoctfile.
** Other new MEX API functions include mexEvalStringWithTrap,
mxIsScalar, mxCreateUninitNumericArray, mxCreateUninitNumericMatrix.
** Other new functions added in 4.2:
audioformats
camlight
condeig
deg2rad
dialog
evalc
hash
im2double
isocaps
lighting
localfunctions
material
normest1
ode23
ode45
odeget
odeplot
odeset
padecoef
profexport
psi
rad2deg
reducepatch
reducevolume
smooth3
uibuttongroup
** Deprecated functions.
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):
Function | Replacement
---------------------|------------------
bitmax | flintmax
mahalanobis | mahal in Octave-Forge statistics pkg
md5sum | hash
octve_config_info | __octave_config_info__
onenormest | normest1
sleep | pause
usleep | pause
wavread | audioread
wavwrite | audiowrite
** 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_unsigned_conversion
interp1q javafields
isequalwithequalnans javamethods
java_convert_matrix re_read_readline_init_file
java_debug read_readline_init_file
java_invoke saving_history
** The global error_state variable in Octave's C++ API has been
deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Now the error
and print_usage functions throw an exception
(octave::execution_exception) after displaying the error message.
This makes the error and print_usage functions in C++ work more like
the corresponding functions in the scripting language.
** The default error handlers in liboctave have been updated to use
exceptions. After displaying an error message they no longer return
control to the calling program. The error handler function can be
customized through the global variables
"current_liboctave_error_handler" and
"current_liboctave_error_with_id_handler". If a programmer has
installed their own custom error handling routines when directly
linking with liboctave then these must be updated to throw an
exception and not return to the calling program.
** The system for common errors and warnings has been renamed from
gripe_XXX to either err_XXX if error is called or warn_XXX if
warning is called. The gripe_XXX functions are deprecated and will
be removed in version 4.6.
** New configure option, --enable-address-sanitizer-flags, to build
Octave with memory allocator checks (similar to those in valgrind)
built in.