Algae News for February 2004

What's Happening Thanks to Randall Skelton for some of the recent improvements. In particular, we now support FFTW for high-performance Fourier transforms. What Needs Doing? Naturally, there are many improvements I'd like to make: We need better control of the run-time error messages we print, as well as a mechanism for identifying exceptions. It seems like we could really use a high-level interface routine for eigenvalues. The atan and atanh functions need improvement for complex arguments. They are based on simple formulas, but better algorithms are available that are faster, more accurate, and less prone to overflow. In the old days, getting Readline to do context-based completion (as on variable names) was nearly impossible. This may have changed -- we ought to take a new look at it. The printf and related functions should be given additional capabilities to accept array arguments. I'm interested in exploring a better arrangement for the help system. Users should be able to tie in documentation for their own code. With the builtin function, Algae has dynamic linking capability. To make this useful, though, we have to document the interface and reorganize the header files. Wouldn't a GTK+ interface be nice? We need to complete the fread and fwrite implementation and we'll probably want an fseek function as well. Recent Releases Below is a digest of recent Algae releases. A complete record is distributed with Algae in the NEWS file.

Version	Date	Type	Description
4.3.6	2/22/04	patch	Fixed label handling bug in "set" introduced in version 4.3.1. Also cleaned up and documented label handling in "complement", "intersection", and "union".
4.3.5	2/11/04	patch	Add support for short int endian conversions in "fread".
4.3.4	12/16/03	patch	Fixed disassemble bug involving "veil" statement. Use "enable-debug" instead of "with-debug" in configure.
4.3.3	12/9/03	patch	Use dlmalloc in place of the C library's malloc, by default. Replaced code for "magic" with faster code from Octave.
4.3.2	11/29/03	patch	Ouch! Fixed a nasty bug in "filter".
4.3.1	11/24/03	patch	New functions added: "erf", "erfc", "gcd", "lcm", "primef", "primes", and "trapz". Several efficiency improvements, some pretty dramatic. Short ints supported in "fread" and "fwrite".
4.3.0	10/4/03	minor	Enable linking to FFTW for high-performance Fourier transforms. Several functions now handle matrix arguments: "fft", "ifft", "max", "min", "imax", and "imin". New "circshift" function. Support for Mac OS X.
4.2.1	8/6/03	patch	Added the "$digits" global variable.
4.2.0	8/5/03	minor	New "veil" statement allows temporary changes to global variables.
4.1.4	8/2/03	patch	Improved configuration for floating point exception handling, and fixed "select" for zero-length vectors.
4.1.3	5/16/03	patch	Configuration improvements.
4.1.2	3/19/03	patch	Minor installation improvements.
4.0.1	9/21/02	patch	Restored optional linking to NPSOL.
4.0.0	9/15/02	major	Added the try/catch mechanism for control of exception handling.
3.7.3	7/31/02	patch	Added the "iram" (ARPACK) function for solving sparse eigenvalue problems.
3.7.2	5/12/02	patch	Replaced "tril" and "triu" with improved builtin functions.
3.7.1	5/6/02	patch	Fixed integer overflow problems in "band" and "cram".
3.7.0	4/24/02	minor	Incorporated the SuperLU package for solving sparse linear systems.
3.6.2	11/1/01	patch	Minor installation improvements.
3.6.1	10/26/01	patch	Improved the logical operations to do a much better job at maintaining sparsity. New standard function "select".
3.6.0	10/11/01	minor	Changes to matrix bandwidth minimization code, and new "equilibrate" function. Added other new functions, and fixed deficiencies in the "transform" function.
3.5.2	9/19/01	patch	Fix errors involving hermitian symmetry.
3.5.1	9/14/01	patch	Configuration accommodations for AIX, and fix for obscure matrix multiplication bug.
3.5.0	8/31/01	minor	Added "short-circuit" logical operators && and ||. Use floating point exception support from glibc 2.2 on Linux. Numerous other improvements, and several minor bug fixes.
3.4.0	5/1/98	minor	New assignment operators: *=, /=, @=, and %=.
3.3.6	4/1/98	patch	Various configuration improvements.
3.3.5	3/3/98	patch	Improved the "umin" function; now it can pass parameters to the objective function. Also improved configuration for HP-UX 10.
3.3.4	10/21/97	patch	Fixed a bug introduced in version 3.3.3, involving the "provide" and "require" functions.
3.3.3	10/18/97	patch	Standard user functions are now pre-compiled. This makes startup much faster.
3.3.2	10/5/97	patch	New "-x" command line option causes algae not to read stdin by default when no file names are given on the command line.
3.3.1	9/25/97	patch	New "-R" and "-n" command line options.
3.3.0	9/2/97	minor	Better support for "site" files. The "src" and "require" functions now look in ~/algae and /usr/local/lib/algae/site/A (by default), unless overridden by the ALGAE_SRC_PATH environment variable.
3.2.9	8/4/97	patch	Improvements in the "info" function.
3.2.8	7/28/97	patch	Improved EOF handling in "fread", and a few minor bug fixes.
3.2.7	7/24/97	patch	Minor bug fixes.
3.2.6	6/25/97	patch	New "char" function and faster "get" and "put".
3.2.5	5/13/97	patch	Fixed a serious bug in the "improved" sorting.
3.2.4	5/9/97	patch	Previously, Algae had used a "heap sort" algorithm for sorting vectors. It turns out that it was extremely inefficient when the vector contained many duplicate elements. Now we use quicksort.
3.2.3	5/2/97	patch	Algae now catches SIGQUIT and makes a clean exit.
3.2.2	4/25/97	patch	This patch release fixed an installation problem that affected users lacking a Fortran compiler.
3.2.1	3/28/97	patch	Added float (4-byte real number) capability to the fread and fwrite functions. A few minor bugs were also fixed.
3.2.0	2/21/97	minor	This is the first release of Algae. Previously, it was called Alki.
3.0.0	5/9/96	major	Among other things, a significant syntax change was adopted.

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