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<h2 class="chapter">4 What's new in version series 3.4.N and 3.5.N of Octave</h2>
<p>The 3.4.N series has enough new features to justify a minor version
number change. The full details are in the <samp><span class="file">NEWS</span></samp> file, but in
brief 3.4.N series brings:
<!-- This list is distilled from the NEWS file. Does it have enough -->
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<ul>
<li>ARPACK now distributed with Octave
<li>Indexing optimisations
<li>FTP object using <samp><span class="file">libcurl</span></samp>
<li>Better consistency with ismatrix, issquare, and issymetric
<li>Function handles aware of overloaded functions
<li>More efficient matrix division by making a single LAPACK call
<li>Other optimisations in matrix operations
<li><code>bsxfun</code> optimised for basic arithmetic functions
<li><span class="sc">Matlab</span>-style ignoring of output arguments using ‘<samp><span class="samp">~</span></samp>’
<li>Many optimisations of the <code>accumarray</code> function
<li>Sparse matrix indexing has been rewritten for speed
<li>Configuration pseudo-variables like <code>page_screen_output</code>
accept a “local” option argument to limit their scope to function
scope
<li>The <code>pkg</code> command now accepts a <code>-forge</code> option to pull
packages directly from Octave-forge
<li>Several <code>dlmread</code> improvements
<li>Octave now uses gnulib for better cross-platform compatibility
</ul>
<p>Here are some features that have been around since 3.2.N
<ul>
<li>integer types
<li>fixed point arithmetic
<li>sparse matrices
<li>Linear programming code based on GLPK
<li>64-bit compilation support
<li>gzipped files and stream and consequently support of <span class="sc">Matlab</span> v7 files
<li>better support for both msvc and mingw
<li>a fully compatible MEX interface
<li>many many other minor features and compatibility changes
<li>OpenGL graphics toolkit
<p>An experimental OpenGL graphics toolkit to replace gnuplot.
<li>Object Orient Programming
<li>Block comments
<li>imwrite and imread
<p>The functions are based on the GraphicsMagick library.
<li>Lazy transpose
<p>Special treatment in the parser of things like "a' * b", where the
transpose is never explicitly formed but a flag is rather passed to the
underlying LAPACK code.
<li>Single precision type
<li>Improved array indexing
The underlying code used for indexing of arrays has been completely
rewritten and so the indexing of arrays is now significantly faster.
</ul>
<p>Here are some older features that have been around since 2.1.N:
<ul>
<li>NDarrays
<li>cells
</ul>
<p>The 3.5.N series is the current development release and will become a
3.6.N release in the future. This series brings the following new
features:
<ul>
<li>Perl-compatible regular expressions are now part of Octave
</ul>
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