Analytica 4.0 beta Release Notes

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The following Release Notes apply to Build 4.0.0.30.

Installation Notes

• Installing 4.0 beta with 3.1 already installed seems to work fine. Both can co-exist. After the 4.0 install, the .ana file extension, and OLE linking, will use Anaytica 4.0.

• Uninstalling 3.x after 4.0 has been installed wipes out the 4.0 registry tree. After uninstalling 3.x, you will need to re-run the 4.0 installer.

Using Models from Analytica 3.1

Most models created in Analyica 3.1 should load and evaluate fine in 4.0. We hope beta testers will validate that 4.0 works with their pre-existing models and computes the same results (unless there is a good reason why the result should be different). Note that there are a couple areas where results are expected to be different:

• Graphing: Many Graph Setup settings will not transfer to 4.0. For example, axis range settings are structured entirely differently in 4.0. So, some tweaking of graphs is to be expected.

• Multiplication of 0*NaN and 0*INF: The results of multiplying a value by zero when that value is INF, -INF or NaN has changed from 3.1 to 4.0. Analytica 4.0 is now in accordance with the Ana:IEEE 754 Binary Floating Point Arithmetic standard, so that 0*NaN or 0*INF results in NaN. In 3.1 the result was zero. If your model took advantage of the old behavior to zero out NaNs or INFs, you may find many NaNs or Nulls in downstream results that were not there in 3.1. We advise keeping the "Show result warnings" preference on since a warning is issued if your model relies on the old behavior, and will pinpoint where this is occurring.

• Choice: If you have a Choice pulldown that uses a list of identifiers, or a list of expressions, you may experience a difference in the result of evaluating Choice, with 3.1 evaluating the variables or expressions, and 4.0 returning the actual varTerm or expressionTerm unevaluated. This behavior is still subject to change. Let us know if you encounter an example in a pre-existing model where difference is relevant (we would like to adopt the unevaluated behavior as default, but would like to get a feel for how many pre-existing models, if any, would be effected by backward compatibility issues before making a final call on this one).

Not Working

• Printing and Print Preview are not working well. We advise not printing for now, and we do not need you to report bugs related to printing or previewing at this time.

• There may be some problems saving models in XML format, especially related to system variable settings. For important stuff, it is safest to stick with the default Analytica file format for now.