## 3 What's new in version series 2.9.N and 3.0.N of Octave

The 2.9.N series, started in March 2005, has enough new features to justify a major version number change. The latest version are as stable as the last 2.1.N releases and stability should increase as one gets near version 3.0.

The 2.9.N and 3.0.N series brings

- 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 compatiable MEX interface
- many many other minor features and compatibility changes

Here are some features that have been around since 2.1.N

- NDarrays
- cells