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[Changeset]: Update to NEWS for 3.2
From: |
David Bateman |
Subject: |
[Changeset]: Update to NEWS for 3.2 |
Date: |
Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:43:36 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 (X11/20080306) |
Attached is an initial attempt at an update to the NEWS file for a 3.2
release.. Its really rough and probably is missing a number of points,
so comments are welcome.
Regards
David
--
David Bateman address@hidden
Motorola Labs - Paris +33 1 69 35 48 04 (Ph)
Parc Les Algorithmes, Commune de St Aubin +33 6 72 01 06 33 (Mob)
91193 Gif-Sur-Yvette FRANCE +33 1 69 35 77 01 (Fax)
The information contained in this communication has been classified as:
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[ ] Motorola Confidential Proprietary
# HG changeset patch
# User David Bateman <address@hidden>
# Date 1217259670 -7200
# Node ID 31e5eeb92910ae337c0a831bc502fc2655f8f33e
# Parent c8c68f642e598e5d00cbc4815661584a48544922
Initial update of NEWS for 3.2 release
diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,8 @@ 2008-07-21 John W. Eaton <address@hidden
+2008-07-28 David Bateman <address@hidden>
+
+ * NEWS.3: Copy from NEWS.
+ * NEWS: Initial update in preparation for a 3.2 release.
+
2008-07-21 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>
* configure.in: If FTGL.h is found, then also include
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -1,200 +1,70 @@ Summary of important user-visible change
-Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.0:
+Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.2:
---------------------------------------------------------
- ** Compatibility with Matlab graphics is much better now. We now
- have some graphics features that work like Matlab's Handle
- Graphics (tm):
+ ** Compatibility with Matlab graphics is much better now.
- + You can make a subplot and then use the print function to
- generate a file with the plot.
+ TO BE WRITTEN (Shai / Micheal inputs please)
- + RGB line colors are supported if you use gnuplot 4.2. Octave
- can still use gnuplot 4.0, but there is no way to set arbitrary
- line colors with it when using the Matlab-style plot functions.
- There never was any way to do this reliably with older versions
- of gnuplot (whether run from Octave or not) since it only
- provided a limited set to choose from, and they were terminal
- dependent, so choosing color 1 with the X11 terminal would be
- different from color 1 with the PostScript terminal. Valid RGB
- colors for gnuplot 4.0 are the eight possible combinations of 0
- and 1 for the R, G and B values. Invalid values are all mapped
- to the same color.
+ ** Eliminate the functions for direct access to gnuplot from Octave.
+ 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.
- This also affects patch objects used in the bar, countour, meshc
- and surfc functions, where the bars and contours will be
- monochrome. A workaround for this is to type "colormap gmap40"
- that loads a colormap that in many cases will be adequate for
- simple bar and contour plots.
+ ** Object Oriented Programming
- + You can control the width of lines using (for example):
+ TO BE WRITTEN
- line (x, y, "linewidth", 4, "color", [1, 0, 0.5]);
+ ** Block comments
+ Commented code can be between matching "%{" 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,
- (this also shows the color feature).
+ function y = func (x)
+ y = 2 * x;
+ %{
+ y += 1;
+ %}
+ endfunction
- + With gnuplot 4.2, image data is plotted with gnuplot and may be
- combined with other 2-d plot data.
+ the line "y += 1;" will not be executed.
+
+ ** Removed the Control, Finance and Quaternions toolboxes
+ These toolboxes have been removed and ported to octave-forge, and
+ they are specialized toolboxes that not all users need. These
+ functions can be reinstalled use the Octave package manager (see
+ the pkg function) and the packages available at
- + Lines for contour plots are generated with an Octave function, so
- contour plots are now 2-d plots instead of special 3-d plots, and
- this allows you to plot additional 2-d data on top of a contour
- plot.
+ http://octave.sourceforge.net/packages.html
- + With the gnuplot "extended" terminals the TeX interpreter is
- emulated. However, this means that the TeX interpreter is only
- supported on the postscript terminals with gnuplot 4.0. Under
- gnuplot 4.2 the terminals aqua, dumb, png, jpeg, gif, pm, windows,
- wxt, svg and x11 are supported as well.
+ ** The imwrite and imread function have been included in Octave based
+ on the GraphicsMagick library.
- + The following plot commands are now considered obsolete and will
- be removed from a future version of Octave:
+ ** 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. This significantly
+ improves the speed.
- __gnuplot_set__
- __gnuplot_show__
- __gnuplot_plot__
- __gnuplot_splot__
- __gnuplot_replot__
+ ** Single Precision data type
+ Octave now includes a single precision data type. Single precision
+ variables can be created with the "single" command, or from
+ function like ones, etc. For example
- Additionally, these functions no longer have any effect on plots
- created with the Matlab-style plot commands (plot, line, mesh,
- semilogx, etc.).
+ 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")
- + Plot property values are not extensively checked. Specifying
- invalid property values may produce unpredictible results.
+ all create single precision variables. 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.
- + Octave now sends data over the same pipe that is used to send
- commands to gnuplot. While this avoids the problem of
- cluttering /tmp with data files, it is no longer possible to use
- the mouse to zoom in on plots. This is a limitation of gnuplot,
- which is unable to zoom when the data it plots is not stored in
- a file. Some work has been done to fix this problem in newer
- versions of gnuplot (> 4.2.2). See for example, this thread
-
- http://www.nabble.com/zooming-of-inline-data-tf4357017.html#a12416496
-
- on the gnuplot development list.
-
-
- ** The way Octave handles search paths has changed. Instead of
- setting the built-in variable LOADPATH, you must use addpath,
- rmpath, or path to manipulate the function search path. These
- functions will maintain "." at the head of the path, for
- compatibility with Matlab.
-
- Leading, trailing or doubled colons are no longer special.
- Now, all elements of the search path are explicitly included in
- the path when Octave starts. To display the path, use the path
- function.
-
- Path elements that end in // are no longer searched recursively.
- Instead, you may use addpath and the genpath function to add an
- entire directory tree to the path. For example,
-
- addpath (genpath ("~/octave"));
-
- will add ~/octave and all directories below it to the head of the
- path.
-
-
- ** Previous versions of Octave had a number of built-in variables to
- control warnings (for example, warn_divide_by_zero). These
- variables have been replaced by warning identifiers that are used
- with the warning function to control the state of warnings.
-
- For example, instead of writing
-
- warn_divide_by_zero = false;
-
- to disable divide-by-zero warnings, you should write
-
- warning ("off", "Octave:divide-by-zero");
-
- You may use the same technique in your own code to control
- warnings. For example, you can use
-
- warning ("My-package:phase-of-the-moon",
- "the phase of the moon could cause trouble today");
-
- to allow users to control this warning using the
- "My-package:phase-of-the-moon" warning identifier.
-
- You may also enable or disable all warnings, or turn them into
- errors:
-
- warning ("on", "all");
- warning ("off", "all");
- warning ("error", "Octave:divide-by-zero");
- warning ("error", "all");
-
- You can query the state of current warnings using
-
- warning ("query", ID)
- warning ("query")
-
- (only those warning IDs which have been explicitly set are
- returned).
-
- A partial list and description of warning identifiers is available
- using
-
- help warning_ids
-
-
- ** All built-in variables have been converted to functions. This
- change simplifies the interpreter and allows a consistent
- interface to internal variables for user-defined packages and the
- core functions distributed with Octave. In most cases, code that
- simply accesses internal variables does not need to change. Code
- that sets internal variables will change. For example, instead of
- writing
-
- PS1 = ">> ";
-
- you will need to write
-
- PS1 (">> ");
-
- If you need write code that will run in both old and new versions
- of Octave, you can use something like
-
- if (exist ("OCTAVE_VERSION") == 5)
- ## New:
- PS1 (">> ");
- else
- ## Old:
- PS1 = ">> ";
- endif
-
-
- ** For compatibility with Matlab, the output order of Octave's
- "system" function has changed from
-
- [output, status] = system (cmd);
-
- to
-
- [status, output] = system (cmd);
-
-
- ** For compatibility with Matlab, the output of Octave's fsolve
- function has been changed from
-
- [x, info, msg] = fsolve (...);
-
- to
-
- [x, fval, info] = fsolve (...);
-
-
- ** For compatibility with Matlab, normcdf, norminv, normpdf, and
- normrnd have been modified to compute distributions using the
- standard deviation instead of the variance.
-
-
- ** For compatibility with Matlab, gamcdf, gaminv, gampdf, gamrnd,
- expcdf, expinv, exppdf and exprnd have been modified to compute
- the distributions using the standard scale factor rather than
- one over the scale factor.
-
-
-See NEWS.2 for old news.
+See NEWS.3 for old news.
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS.3
copy from NEWS
copy to NEWS.3
- [Changeset]: Update to NEWS for 3.2,
David Bateman <=