4 What's new in version series 3.4.N and 3.5.N of Octave
The 3.4.N series has enough new features to justify a minor version
number change. The full details are in the NEWS file, but in
brief 3.4.N series brings:
     
- ARPACK now distributed with Octave
     
- Indexing optimisations
     
- FTP object using libcurl
     
- Better consistency with ismatrix, issquare, and issymetric
     
- Function handles aware of overloaded functions
     
- More efficient matrix division by making a single LAPACK call
     
- Other optimisations in matrix operations
     
- bsxfunoptimised for basic arithmetic functions
- Matlab-style ignoring of output arguments using ‘~’
     
- Many optimisations of the accumarrayfunction
- Sparse matrix indexing has been rewritten for speed
     
- Configuration pseudo-variables like page_screen_outputaccept a “local” option argument to limit their scope to function
scope
- The pkgcommand now accepts a-forgeoption to pull
packages directly from Octave-forge
- Several dlmreadimprovements
- Octave now uses gnulib for better cross-platform compatibility
   
Here are some features that have been around since 3.2.N
     
- integer types
     
- fixed point arithmetic
     
- sparse matrices
     
- Linear programming code based on GLPK
     
- 64-bit compilation support
     
- gzipped files and stream and consequently support of Matlab v7 files
     
- better support for both msvc and mingw
     
- a fully compatible MEX interface
     
- many many other minor features and compatibility changes
     
- OpenGL graphics toolkit
     An experimental OpenGL graphics toolkit to replace gnuplot.
      
- Object Orient Programming
     
- Block comments
     
- imwrite and imread
     The functions are based on the GraphicsMagick library.
      
- Lazy transpose
     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.
      
- Single precision type
     
- 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.
   
Here are some older features that have been around since 2.1.N:
     
   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:
     
- Perl-compatible regular expressions are now part of Octave