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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: 

[x] General Business Information 
[ ] Motorola Internal Use Only 
[ ] 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

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