March 07, 2023
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)
Octave’s libraries are now built using symbol visibility by default.
That means that fewer symbols are exported from these libraries.
Configure with --disable-lib-visibility-flags to export all symbols
(as in previous versions).
filter is now 5X faster, which also speeds up deconv, fftfilt
and arma_rnd by the same amount.
integral can now output a second argument passing the error
measurement used by the underlying integrator.
perms now accepts a second argument “unique” to return only unique
permutations for inputs with repeated elements. It is faster and
takes less memory to call perms ('aaaabbbbcccc', "unique") than to
call unique (perms ('aaaabbbbcccc'), "rows").
quadgk can now accept the ArrayValued input parameter to handle
array-valued input functions.
delaunayn now has consistent trivial simplex checking and removal
for all input dimensions, simplex checking 3D inputs is now
vectorized, and >3D simplex checking performance has been improved.
Simplexes points are now ordered so they will all have positive
outward normal vectors. Input type checking has also been added for
improved error handling.
factor now factorizes all 64-bit integers in roughly the same time.
Previously, the product of two large primes took much longer to factorize
than highly composite inputs.
Refine option is now implemented in functions ode45, ode23,
and ode23s.
Octave is now compatible with PCRE2 (UTF-8). PCRE2 is preferred over PCRE
if both are installed. Configure with --without-pcre2 if you prefer Octave
to use PCRE in this case.
mean now internally processes data as type double to reduce liklihood of
hitting overflow or precision limits with other types (bug #63848).
The GUI has a dark style and several new icons in toolbars for better visibility and higher contrast.
A new terminal widget has been added for the GUI. It is still experimental
and is disabled by default. It can be enabled with the command line
parameter --experimental-terminal-widget.
More fonts for the documentation browser are included.
When printing, the option -svgconvert is now the default. If you want to
use the more limited EPS-based tool chain (the former default)—e.g., if
you encounter inaccurate image rendering—you can pass the -nosvgconvert
option to the print function.
figure graphics object:
"innerposition" (equivalent to "position")"windowstate" (not yet implemented)"itemhitfcn", allowing the
execution of a callback function when a legend item is clicked.inline functions now support all Matlab methods. The performance
of inline functions has also been improved.
sub2ind now supports index values outside of the size specified by
the subscripts.
cylinder now accepts a scalar for the radius argument.
clock now has an optional second output ISDST which indicates if
Daylight Savings Time is in effect for the system’s time zone.
print now accepts option -image to specify the “opengl” renderer
and -vector to specify the “painters” renderer.
format now accepts the option “default”, which is equivalent to
calling format without any options to reset the default state.
quadgk now stops iterating when error <= tolerance while the previous
condition was error < tolerance.
mean now accepts vector dimensions and options to handle NaN values.
The option "a" (arithmetic mean), "g" (geometric mean), and "h"
(harmonic mean) are no longer accepted, only the arithmetic mean is computed.
For the geometric and harmonic mean, please use respective functions
geomean and harmmean from the Octave Statistics package.
var and std now optionally output a second argument containing the mean
or weighted mean.
integral can now accept the ‘ArrayValued’ option in combination with
‘RelTol’ and ‘WayPoints’.
File system operations that remove files (e.g., unlink or rmdir) now also
remove files that have their read-only file attribute set on Windows.
The default state for certain graphics properties has been made consistent with Matlab.
Object | Property | Default State
------------|------------------|------------
figure | "dockcontrols" | "on"
ode45, ode23, and ode23s have improved results for options Events,
OutputFcn, and Refine, along with corrected orientation of struct
outputs.
Early notice of future breaking changes: Due to many user requests that
Octave should have a Matlab-compatible string class, there is work under way
to implement a string class that will differ from a vector of characters. In
Octave, single-quoted character arrays are currently compatible with Matlab,
but double-quoted forms are not. Currently in Octave, both ‘foo’ and “foo”
are largely interchangeable, barring certain escape sequence interpretations
such as “\n” (converted to a single newline character) as opposed to ‘\n’
(two separate characters). Matlab’s single-quoted character arrays and
double-quoted strings do not process backslash escape sequences, unlike many
other languages, and those escape sequences are instead processed by
individual functions such as fprintf.
Octave’s behavior is likely to change in future as a consequence of implementing Matlab-style string syntax. For example, ‘foo’ will remain a three-element character vector, but “foo” will become a single-element string object. Some backslash escape sequences are likely to differ from their current Octave behavior, but will achieve greater Matlab compatibility. The exact implementation is a work in progress, and may or may not include methods of preserving backward compatibility.
What this means for user code: If your code currently relies on
double-quoted strings (e.g., “foo”) representing character vectors as
opposed to string objects, and if you intend to update to a future version of
Octave incorporating the above changes, then consider replacing all
double-quoted strings with single-quoted strings in your code over time
(e.g., replace “foo” with ‘foo’). Single-quoted strings are expected to
retain current behavior. Further, if your code relies on backslash escape
sequence interpretation in double-quoted strings (except for special cases
like the printf family), that code may need to change as well.
clearAllMemoizedCachesmatlab.lang.MemoizedFunctionmemoizenormalizepagectransposepagetransposeuifigureThe following functions and properties have been deprecated in Octave 8 and will be removed from Octave 10 (or whatever version is the second major release after 8):
Functions
Function | Replacement
-----------------------|------------------
shift | circshift
sparse_auto_mutate | none (see below)
The sparse_auto_mutate function no longer has any effect on Octave’s
behavior. Previously, after calling sparse_auto_mutate (true),
Octave would automatically convert sparse matrices to full when a
sparse matrix required more memory than simply using full matrix
storage. This setting was false by default for compatibility with
Matlab. Now you must manually convert to full storage when desired.
Properties
The following property names are discouraged, but there is no fixed date for their removal.
Object | Property | Replacement
-----------------|-------------|------------
uimenu | label | text
uimenu | callback | menuselectedfcn
The following functions were deprecated in Octave 6 and have been removed from Octave 8.
Functions
Function | Replacement
-------------|------------
runtests | oruntests
The environment variable used by mkoctfile for linker flags is now
LDFLAGS rather than LFLAGS. LFLAGS was deprecated in Octave 6,
and will be removed in a future version of Octave.
poly, pinv, patch,
fill, fill3, qp, datevec, textscan, sub2ind, qr, airy,
regexp, dec2bin, dec2hex, mean, and many others.complex, fftw, delaunayn, isfield, tsearch,
sparse matrix exponentiation, other sparse operations, and many others.@audiorecorder and @audioplayer classes.