This page documents incompatibilities accross MATLAB versions. For each MATLAB release, it gives the main changes appearing in that release and that Dynare needs to handle.

Note that all changes are not documented, please refer to the official release notes for a full list: for releases up to 6.5.1 (R13SP1), and for releases since 7.0 (R14).

Dynare deals with these incompatibilities at three places:

• in the configure script, via the various m4 macros for MATLAB

• in the M-files, mainly through matlab/dynare_config.m

• in the C++ source for MEX files, mainly through dynmex.h, dynblas.h and dynlapack.h in mex/sources

MATLAB 8.3 (R2014a)

• mex internals have changed

  • the name of some variables for optimization/linking flags has changed
  • the quoting rules for variable redefinition have changed

• flipdim now obsolete (replace by flip)

• New functions isdiag, isbanded, issymmetric, ishermitian, istril, istriu, and bandwidth for testing matrix structure

• New function sylvester for solving the Sylvester equation

• New option for eig function for computing left eigenvectors

• New option for rand, randi, and randn functions for creating arrays of random numbers that match data type of an existing variable

• Some improvements to readtable

MATLAB 8.2 (R2013b)

• Many changes in repmat calling syntax. Some issue warnings, some issue errors

MATLAB 8.1 (R2013a)

• Under GNU/Linux, option -nojvm is now incompatible with the usage of graphic handles

• New functions: strsplit, strjoin, flintmax,

• Error and warnings identifiers have changes (how they changed is not documented in the release notes…)

• The behavior of unique, union, intersect, setdiff, setxor, and ismember has changed

• Removed functions: cholinc, luinc, setDefaultStream and getDefaultStream of RandStream class

MATLAB 8.0 (R2012b)

• Syntax for abstract classes

• switch constructs can behave differently when given enumerations

• Classes can define a property attribute only once in a properties block

• New functions: ddensd, atan2d

• Interface changes for: besselh, besseli, besselj, besselk, bessely, airy, psi

• Removed functions: wklinfo, wklread, wklwrite

• Bit-wise operations now support signed integers

• xlsread now reads data from XLSM, XLTX, and XLTM files and supports named ranges on all platforms

• Multiple delimiter support in textscan function

MATLAB 7.14 (R2012a)

• New functions: integral, integral2, and integral3

• Removed functions: griddata3, delaunay3, tsearch, dsearch

MATLAB 7.13 (R2011b)

• New class griddedInterpolant for interpolation

• New options for randperm, RandStream.randperm, qr

• Behavior changed for meshgrid and ndgrid

• Removed function: bessel

• New functions: matfile, narginchk (replaces nargchk)

• Behavior changed for nargoutchk

• Some error and warning identifiers have changed

MATLAB 7.12 (R2011a)

• New functions: rng, ichol

• New options for gammainc

• qr behaviour is reverted back to pre-R2010a behaviour (see R2010a releases notes)

• Deprecated functions: luinc, cholinc

• The old methods for random generators (rand or randn with 'seed', 'state' or 'twister' inputs) are deprecated in favor of rng

• The getDefaultStream and setDefaultStream methods of RandStream class are deprecated in favor of getGlobalStream and setGlobalStream methods

• New higher-level functions for HDF5 format, replacing older interface
• Regular expressions in MATLAB now support successful zero-length matching

MATLAB 7.11 (R2010b)

• New functions: isrow, iscolumn, and ismatrix

• Deprecated functions: bessel, erfcore, intwarning, mmreader, wavplay, wavrecord, wk1finfo, wk1read, wk1write

• Core MATLAB functions do 64-bit integer arithmetic (int64 and uint64 classes)

• Change in the behavior of timeseries objects

• The arrayfun function now accepts an array of objects as an input. The output can also be a scalar object, as long as the UniformOutput flag is set to false.

• In previous versions of MATLAB, calling isequalwithequalnans to compare identical arrays of objects that contain one or more NaN (Not a Number) values incorrectly returned false. Similarly, calling isequal to compare identical arrays of objects that contain NaNs incorrectly returned true. In MATLAB version 7.11, these functions return the expected values (true for isequalwithequalnans, and false for isequal) when used to compare object arrays.

• 4th return argument of fileparts removed

• Options -inline and -argcheck of mex command removed

MATLAB 7.10 (R2010a)

• the following functions are now deprecated (but still work): isstr, setstr, str2mat, strread, strvcat, textread. See http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/rn/br_bpq8-1.html#bsdnyvb-1 for their replacements

• in the output of the qr function, R now contains only real, nonnegative diagonal elements. Since the QR factorization is not unique, the answer is still correct. In previous releases, the diagonal of R could contain complex and negative elements.

• if you have a function, such as the following, that returns a struct array:

function structOut = getStruct
structOut = struct('fieldA', 5, 'fieldB', 10);

it is no longer valid to access fields of the structure by directly dot indexing the function's return value, as shown here:

getStruct.fieldA

Instead, you should first assign the returned structure to a variable, and then dot index the variable:

s = getStruct;
s.fieldA
ans =
     5

MATLAB 7.9 (R2009b)

• maxNumCompThreads now issues a warning, and will be removed in a future version

• ~ notation added to denote function input/output arguments to be ignored

MATLAB 7.8 (R2009a)

• New command line option -singleCompThread for disabling automatic multithreading

• New function: quad2d

• Changed functions: conv, conv2, convn

• On 64-bit platforms, BLAS and LAPACK now internally use 64-bit integers

MATLAB 7.7 (R2008b)

• Changed functions: randn, randi

MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a)

• Multithreading enabled by default

• New functions: clearvars, memory, onCleanup

MATLAB 7.5 (R2007b)

• New functions: quadgk, bvp5c, maxNumCompThreads

• Changed functions: dmperm

• On 64-bit platforms, MATLAB arrays are no longer limited to 2³¹ elements. The limit in MATLAB 7.5 is 2⁴⁸-1.

• BLAS and LAPACK now in separate DLLs

MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a)

• New functions: bsxfun, ilu, assert, ismac, verLessThan

• Changed functions: rand, dir

• Divide By Zero and Log Of Zero Warnings Off By Default

• Multithreading implemented, but not activated by default (but function maxNumCompThreads not yet implemented)

• Introduction of MATLAB for Macintosh (Intel)
• Default MEX extension changed for Macintosh (PowerPC)

MATLAB 7.3 (R2006b)

• New functions: amd, bvpxtend, ldl

• Changed functions: lu, chol, unique

• In MEX files, the following types are introduced:

  • mwSize: represents size values, such as array dimensions and number of elements

  • mwIndex: represents index values, such as indices into arrays

  On 32-bit machines, these types are simply aliases for int.

  On 64-bit machines, it depends on whether one gives the -largeArrayDims for the MEX command:

  • without -largeArrayDims, these types are int (and therefore 32 bits)

  • with -largeArrayDims, these types are size_t, which is an alias for unsigned long (and therefore 64 bits); this option is mandatory when using sparse arrays

  On 64-bit machines, it is therefore necessary to recompile MEX files which use sparse arrays.

MATLAB 7.2 (R2006a)

• New functions: idivide, setenv

• On Linux, MATLAB now built with gcc 3.4: MEX files need to be rebuilt
• Introduction of MATLAB for Windows 64-bit

MATLAB 7.1 (R14SP3)

• New functions: hypot, mode, arrayfun, exifread, structfun, swapbytes, typecast

• Modified functions: accumarray, odeset, rand, svd, cellfun, datestr, error, isfield, lasterror, rethrow, who, whos

• On Windows, the MEX command supports -l and -L options

• On Windows, .mexw32 is now the default extension for MEX files (instead of .dll)

• New mexext shell script to recover the MEX extension in Makefiles

• The import libraries for the MATLAB DLL files have been moved up a directory level and are no longer specific to the compiler version. The new location for these files is: $matlab/extern/lib/$arch/$vendor

MATLAB 7.0.4 (R14SP2)

MATLAB 7.0.1 (R14SP1)

• New function: ordeig

• Under Windows, this release cannot be used to compile the MEX files (BLAS/LAPACK developer libraries missing)

MATLAB 7.0 (R14)

• New format (v7) for MAT files

• Inf and NaN accept dimension arguments for creating matrices

• eps accepts an argument for computing relative precision

• New functions: addtodate, genvarname, intmax, intmin, intwarning, isfloat, isinteger, isscalar, isstrprop, isvector, mmfileinfo, recycle, restoredefaultpath, strtrim, textscan, xlswrite

• Changed functions: xlsread, dlmwrite, xlsinfo

• Added nested functions

• Functions handles can be called directly without feval

• On Linux and Macintosh systems, all MEX-files that can throw errors need to be recompiled
• Shared libraries previously residing in directory $MATLAB/extern/lib/$ARCH are now in $MATLAB/bin/$ARCH