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## 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
- `bsxfun` optimised for basic arithmetic functions
- Matlab-style ignoring of output arguments using ‘`~`’
- Many optimisations of the `accumarray` function
- Sparse matrix indexing has been rewritten for speed
- Configuration pseudo-variables like `page_screen_output` accept a “local” option argument to limit their scope to function scope
- The `pkg` command now accepts a `-forge` option to pull packages directly from Octave-forge
- Several `dlmread` improvements
- 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:

- NDarrays
- cells

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