Walking Randomly

A major new release of the free alternative to MATLAB, GNU Octave was released a couple of weeks ago (on June 6th to be precise).  The Octave team have added many new features and so this release looks well worth checking out.  The full set of user visible changes can be found on the Octave website but a few highlights include.

• Compatibility with Matlab graphics has been improved – many new graphics functions added including ezplot,
  isosurface and plotmatrix.
• New functions for reading and writing images. The imwrite and imread functions have been included in Octave.
• New experimental OpenGL/FLTK based plotting system. An experimental plotting system based on OpenGL and the FLTK toolkit is now part of Octave.
• Object Oriented Programming.
• New numerical integration (quadrature) functions – dblquad, quadgk, quadv and triplequad
• Octave now includes a single precision data type. Single precision variables can be created with the single command, or from functions like ones, eye, etc.
• 64-bit integer arithmetic has been added. Arithmetic with 64-bit integers (int64 and uint64 types) is fully supported.
• Improved array indexing. The underlying code used for indexing of arrays has been completely rewritten and indexing is now significantly faster
• Various other performance improvements.
• Loads of new functions.