March 14, 2024
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)
dec2base, dec2bin, and dec2hex have all been overhauled. All three
functions now accommodate negative inputs and fractional inputs, and repeated
code between the functions has been reduced or eliminated. Previously only
dec2bin and dec2hex accepted negative inputs but dec2base did not, and
none of the three accepted fractional inputs. Now, dec2base (100*pi, 16, 4,
6), for example, returns a base-16 string with four places for the integer
part and six places for the fractional part. Omitting the number of decimal
places (the fourth input) retains old behavior for backward compatibility,
except that non-integer inputs will no longer produce errors.
quiver and quiver3 now properly plot non-float numeric inputs by
internally casting them to ‘double’ (bug #59695). Both functions now honor
a previously ignored scaling factor input when there is only a single arrow
(bug #39552), and quiver3 no longer produces an error when a scaling factor
is given without x and y inputs. Both functions now also accept a scale
factor of “off” which is equivalent to setting it to 0. When a linestyle
with a base marker is set suppressing arrowhead display, subsequent
name-value property pairs in the quiver/quiver3 function call will no
longer turn arrowhead display back on (bug #64143). The linewidth property
now also affects the line width of the base marker.
Classdef files now support breakpoints inside them.
The inputParser function has been re-architected for a 60% performance
improvement.
The perms function has been made faster.
The audiowrite function now supports writing to MPEG audio
formats—including MP3—if the sndfile library supports it.
oruntests: The current directory now changes to the directory
containing the files with the tests for the duration of the test. This
aligns the behavior of this function with Octave’s test suite. This also
means that the file encoding specified in the .oct-config file for the
respective directory is taken into account for the tests.
--with-qt=5 or as a fallback if Qt6 cannot be used.The FLTK backend is not maintained and its use is discouraged. The
recommended backend is qt. Enabling the fltk backend with graphics_toolkit
fltk now emits a warning.
The set function now accepts any combination of name/value pairs, cell
array of names / cell array of values, or property structures. This change
is Matlab compatible.
When the hold function is used without arguments to toggle the current
state, the resulting value is now displayed in the Command Window for
informational purposes.
The axes graphics property "TickDir" now accepts the option "none", which
will not draw tick marks but will still draw tick labels.
Stricter checks are performed for valid dimensions of the color data
properties "CData" and "FaceVertexCData" when rendering patch objects.
The inputParser function now implements the PartialMatching property for
Parameter and Switch names. For Matlab compatibility, PartialMatching
is now set to true by default which may change the behavior of existing code.
Overhauled mean, median, var, and std functions have been imported
from statistics package v1.5.4 to compatibly implement ‘nanflag’
(bug #50571), ‘all’ (bug #58116), and ‘vecdim’ (bug #58089) options, preserve
output class, and match expected output behavior for empty (bug #50583) and
sparse inputs (bug #63291). Both median and mean can handle large
integer values without overflow or precision concerns (bug #54567), and
mean avoids errors due to limits of single precision by processing as
doubles (bug #63848). median has also adopted the ‘outtype’ option from
mean.
Code such as A = ones (3, 3); A(:, :, 1) = [] is now Matlab compatible.
mad function now produces Matlab compatible output using improved mean
and median functions. ‘vecdim’ and ‘all’ options are now supported. mad
ignores all NaN values (using ‘omitnan’ mean/median option) and produces
expected output behavior for empty inputs.
mode now produces Matlab compatible output for empty inputs (bug #50583).
linspace and logspace now handle Inf inputs in a Matlab compatible way.
normalize now produces Matlab compatible output for inputs containing NaN
values (bug #50571).
cov now processes the input form cov(x,y) with two separate data arrays x
and y, as cov(x(:),y(:)) to maintain Matlab compatibility. It also accepts a
NANFLAG option to allow ignoring NaN entries in input data (bug #c) and
produces Matlab compatible outputs for empty inputs (bug #50583). corr and
corrcoef internal code has been adapted to the new cov behavior with no
change to user interface. Packages using the octave core’s cov that rely
on the previous calling form may need to make similar adaptations. Calls for
cov(x) with a vector x expecting a scalar return can get the previous results
from cov(x)(2), and calls to cov(x,y) with x and y matrices expecting
columnwise covariance calculation can obtain the previous results using
cov([x,y])(1:nx, nx+1:end), where nx = columns(x).
qz now handles input and output arguments in a Matlab compatible way. It
always computes the complex QZ decomposition if there are only two input
arguments, and it accepts an optional third input argument ‘real’ or
‘complex’ to select the type of decomposition. The output arguments are
always in the same order independently of the input arguments, and the
generalized eigenvalues are no longer returned (one can use the ordeig
function for that purpose). The optional reordering of the generalized
eigenvalues has been removed (one can use the ordqz function for that
purpose).
pcolor now sets the axes limits to be just large enough to display the
plotted data (equivalent of axis tight).
xlim, ylim, zlim functions can now query or set the limit calculation
method which is one of “tickaligned”, “tight”, or “padded”.
optimget and optimset now produce an error on an ambiguous match of an
incomplete option name instead of emitting a warning.
datevec when provided a date format will match date string characters up to
the length of the format string. A date vector will be returned as long as
the characters up to the format string length are a perfect match, and any
trailing characters in the date string will be ignored. (bug #42241)
unwrap now produces compatible output for inputs with non-finite elements
(Inf, NaN, NA). Such elements will now retained in the output but skipped
over by the wrapping calculation. The function also permits logical inputs
and specified operating dimensions larger than the number of dimensions in
the input array.
The default string length for the function rats has changed from 9 to 13.
Continuing reminder of future breaking changes: There is ongoing work to implement a Matlab compatible 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, and are 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.
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, then start replacing all double-quoted strings
with single-quoted strings in your code over time (e.g., replace “foo” with
‘foo’). Single-quoted strings will retain their current behavior. Further,
if your code relies on backslash escape sequence interpretation in
double-quoted strings (except in special cases like the printf family),
that code may need to change as well.
isenvismembertolisuniformtensorprodThe following functions and properties have been deprecated in Octave 9 and will be removed from Octave 11 (or whatever version is the second major release after 9):
Core
The idx_vector::bool() function is obsolete and always returns true.
Any uses can simply be removed from existing code with no loss of
function.
The all_ok(const Array<octave::idx_vector>&) function in Array-util.h
is obsolete and always returns true. Any uses can simply be removed from
existing code with no loss of function.
The member variable octave_base_value::count is deprecated and will be
removed from Octave 11. Replace all instances with the new name
m_count.
The following features were deprecated in Octave 7 and have been removed from Octave 9.
Functions
Function | Replacement
---------------------------|------------------
disable_diagonal_matrix | optimize_diagonal_matrix
disable_permutation_matrix | optimize_permutation_matrix
disable_range | optimize_range
Operators
Operator | Replacement
---------|------------
.+ | +
.+= | +=
.- | -
.-= | -=
** | ^
**= | ^=
.** | .^
.**= | .^=
Interpreter
The use of '...' for line continuations inside double-quoted strings
has been removed. Use '\' for line continuations inside strings
instead.
The use of '\' as a line continuation outside of double-quoted
strings has been removed. Use '...' for line continuations instead.
Support for trailing whitespace after a '\' line continuation has been
removed. Delete unnecessary trailing whitespace.
For plot functions, the use of numbers to select line colors in shorthand formats was an undocumented feature that was removed in Octave 9.
The environment variable used by mkoctfile for linker flags is now
LDFLAGS rather than LFLAGS. LFLAGS was deprecated in Octave 6 and has
been removed.
Bugfixes to whos -file, urlread, mat2cell, set, savepath,
loadpath, griddata, and the general interpreter stack-handling.
Better input validation for sparse, speye.
Memory usage reduced for movfun and movslice.
Memory usage reduced when saving to file, preventing OOM and data loss.
Memory usage improved when plotting grid tick marks.
Memory management made more robust in the GUI code and with several GUI components (variable editor, doc browser, etc).
Text encoding for non-UTF-8 generally made more robust. File editor now lists available encodings.
Octave on Windows now supports directory names and path names with non-ASCII characters (other platforms had it already for years). Windows paths now also allow relative paths on different drives.
Several race conditions removed in signal handler.
Better compatibility when linking to libc++.
Performance and stability improvements: avoid unnecessary string construction, use static casts instead of dynamic casts where possible, eliminate various isolated crash conditions.