Octave 2.1.61 available for ftp

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Nov-2004, I wrote:

| I know of one problem that should probably be fixed before we
| declare a new recommended snapshot:
| 
|   * Comparison operations for 64-bit integers will not work correctly
|     for large values (> 2^53) because we are converting to double to
|     do the conversions.

This job is done now, but probably needs a little more testing.

| and two more that would be nice to fix:
| 
|   * Things like [int32(1), int16(1)] will fail.  Concatenation
|     operations like this should return an object of the smaller type
|     (int16 in this case).

This is not yet fixed, though it seems it should not be too hard to
add.  I will try to take a look at it, but perhaps David could say
whether it will require more than adding some concat functions.

|   * Concatenation of simple matrix objects should use a more memory
|     efficient method as was done in earlier versions of Octave (but
|     the new code has the distinct advantage of allowing concatenation
|     for user-defined types, so we can't simply revert to the previous
|     method).

David Bateman improved the concat functions, but it is still not clear
to me whether the current method is as efficient as the original
method for concatenation of the built-in matrix objects (real,
complex, character) as the current method still appears to work
pair-wise for expressions like

  [a, b, c, d, e]

so more temporaries are formed than should be needed if we were
working on the entire list at once (the original code scanned the
entire list to determine the size and type of the result, then created
an object to hold it, then filled it with a series of insert
operations).  I understand that this won't work well for user-defined
types and {horz,vert}cat functions, but perhaps it could still be used
if the list only contains the built-in matrix types.

jwe