Summary of important user-visible changes

April 30, 2018

News for version 5 4.4 4.2 4 3.8 3.6 3.4 3.2 3 2 1 (Release History)

General improvements

** A graphical Variable Editor has been added to the GUI interface. It uses a spreadsheet-like interface for quick, intuitive editing of variables. The Variable Editor is launched by double-clicking on a variable name in the Workspace Window or by typing "openvar VARIABLE_NAME" in the Command Window. ** On systems with 64-bit pointers, --enable-64 is now the default and Octave always uses 64-bit indexing. However, if the configure script determines that the BLAS library uses 32-bit integers, then operations using the following libraries are limited to arrays with dimensions that are smaller than 2^31 elements: BLAS LAPACK QRUPDATE SuiteSparse ARPACK Additionally, the following libraries use "int" internally, so maximum problem sizes are always limited: glpk Qhull ** The octave command no longer starts the GUI by default. Most users starting Octave from a shell were expecting the command line interface, and desktop launchers already required the `--force-gui' option. With this change, desktop launchers should be modified to use the new option `--gui'. The previous `--force-gui' option will continue to work, and maps to `--gui', but it will be removed in Octave 6. ** A known bug in Qt (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-55357) is addressed by limiting GUI sub-panel relocation capabilities for Qt versions in the range >= 5.6.1 and < 5.7.1. However, this may not thoroughly avoid issues on all platforms. ** A new container data type--containers.Map--is available. Map is a key/value storage container (a.k.a, a hash) that efficiently allows storing and retrieving values by name, rather than by position which is how arrays work. ** The bareword "import" is now recognized in scripts and functions. However, the functionality to import functions and classes from other namespaces into the local scope has not yet been implemented. Attempting to use "import" will provoke an error message. ** hex2num and num2hex now work for integer and char types and num2hex may optionally return a cell array of strings instead of a character array. If given a cell array of strings, hex2num now returns a numeric array of the same size as the input cell array. Previously, hex2num would accept a cell array of strings of arbitrary dimension but would always return a column vector. ** New special functions cosint, sinint, and gammaincinv have been added. ** Special functions in Octave have been rewritten for larger input domains, better accuracy, and additional options. * gammainc now accepts negative real values for X. * improved accuracy for gammainc, betainc, betaincinv, expint. * gammainc has new options "scaledlower" and "scaledupper". * betainc, betaincinv have new option "upper". ** The "names" option used in regular expressions now returns a struct array, rather than a struct with a cell array for each field. This change was made for Matlab compatibility. ** The quadcc function now uses both absolute tolerance and relative tolerance to determine the stopping criteria for an integration. To be compatible with other quadXXX functions, such as quadgk, the calling syntax has changed to quadcc (f, a, b, [AbsTol, [RelTol]]) To update existing code, change instances of RelTol to [0, RelTol]. quadcc (f, a, b, tol) => quadcc (f, a, b, [0, tol]) A warning that a single tolerance input is now interpreted as an absolute tolerance will be issued in Octave versions 4.4 and 5, after which it will be removed. The warning has ID "Octave:quadcc:RelTol-conversion" and can be disabled with warning ("off", "Octave:quadcc:RelTol-conversion") ** The qr function now returns a standard factorization unless explicitly instructed to perform an economy factorization by using a final argument of 0. ** The Qt graphics toolkit now supports offscreen printing without osmesa if Octave was built with Qt >= 5.1. ** The built-in pager for display of large data is now disabled by default. To re-enable it for every Octave session add the following to your .octaverc file: more on; ** The FLTK toolkit is no longer prioritized for development. The number of Octave Maintainers is too small to support three different graphic toolkits. New development will target the Qt toolkit. While no longer prioritized, the FLTK toolkit is not deprecated and there is no schedule for its removal. ** The graphic object property "PickableParts" has been implemented which controls whether an object can accept mouse clicks. ** The graphic object property "Interruptible" has been fully implemented which controls whether a running callback function can be interrupted by another callback function. ** The graphic object property "HitTest" has been updated to be fully compatible with Matlab. ** Text objects now implement the properties "BackgroundColor", "EdgeColor", "LineStyle", "LineWidth", and "Margin". ** An initial implementation of alpha transparency has been made for patch and surface objects. Printing to svg and pdf is supported. ** ishandle now returns true for both graphics handle objects and Java objects. The latter change was made for Matlab compatibility. Use ishghandle or isgraphics if it is important not to include Java objects. ** The "Octave:undefined-return-values" warning ID is obsolete. Octave now throws an error for any attempts to assign undefined values that might be returned from functions. ** The header file oct-alloc.h has been removed along with the macros that it defined (DECLARE_OCTAVE_ALLOCATOR, DEFINE_OCTAVE_ALLOCATOR, and DEFINE_OCTAVE_ALLOCATOR2). ** The pkg command now accepts a URL as an argument, allowing a valid Octave package to be installed from any remote host with one command, for example pkg install https://example.org/download/example-package.tar.gz ** The following statistical functions have been moved from core Octave to the statistics package available from Octave Forge. BASE cloglog logit prctile probit qqplot table (renamed to crosstab) DISTRIBUTIONS betacdf betainv betapdf betarnd binocdf binoinv binopdf binornd cauchy_cdf cauchy_inv cauchy_pdf cauchy_rnd chi2cdf chi2inv chi2pdf chi2rnd expcdf expinv exppdf exprnd fcdf finv fpdf frnd gamcdf gaminv gampdf gamrnd geocdf geoinv geopdf geornd hygecdf hygeinv hygepdf hygernd kolmogorov_smirnov_cdf laplace_cdf laplace_inv laplace_pdf laplace_rnd logistic_cdf logistic_inv logistic_pdf logistic_rnd logncdf logninv lognpdf lognrnd nbincdf nbininv nbinpdf nbinrnd normcdf norminv normpdf normrnd poisscdf poissinv poisspdf poissrnd stdnormal_cdf stdnormal_inv stdnormal_pdf stdnormal_rnd tcdf tinv tpdf trnd unidcdf unidinv unidpdf unidrnd unifcdf unifinv unifpdf unifrnd wblcdf wblinv wblpdf wblrnd wienrnd MODELS logistic_regression TESTS anova bartlett_test chisquare_test_homogeneity chisquare_test_independence cor_test f_test_regression hotelling_test hotelling_test_2 kolmogorov_smirnov_test kolmogorov_smirnov_test_2 kruskal_wallis_test manova mcnemar_test prop_test_2 run_test sign_test t_test t_test_2 t_test_regression u_test var_test welch_test wilcoxon_test z_test z_test_2 ** The following image functions have been moved from core Octave to the image package available from Octave Forge. ntsc2rgb rgb2ntsc

Deprecated functions and properties

The following functions and properties have been deprecated in Octave 4.4 and will be removed from Octave 6 (or whatever version is the second major release after 4.4):

Functions Function Replacement chop sprintf for visual results desktop isguirunning tmpnam tempname toascii double java2mat __java2mat__

Graphics properties Object Property Value figure doublebuffer mincolormap wvisual wvisualmode xdisplay xvisual xvisualmode axes drawmode annotation edgecolor (“rectangle”) text fontweight “demi” and “light” uicontrol fontweight “demi” and “light” uipanel fontweight “demi” and “light” uibuttongroup fontweight “demi” and “light”

The rectangle and ellipse annotation property "edgecolor" has been deprecated and will be removed from Octave 6 (or whatever version is the second major release after 4.4). Use the property "color" instead.

Removed functions

The following functions were deprecated in Octave 4.0 and have been removed from Octave 4.4.

allow_noninteger_range_as_index

bicubic

delaunay3

do_braindead_shortcircuit_evaluation

dump_prefs

find_dir_in_path

finite

fmod

fnmatch

gmap40

loadaudio

luinc

mouse_wheel_zoom

nfields

octave_tmp_file_name

playaudio

saveaudio

setaudio

syl

usage

Alphabetical list of new functions added in Octave 4.4