Analytica 4.0 beta Release Notes

Revision as of 17:10, 23 March 2007 by Lchrisman (talk | contribs) (link to 4.0.0.38)

(Back to Beta Tester Page)

The following Release Notes apply to Build 4.0.0.37.

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 Analytica 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 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.

A more comprehensive set of issues is maintained at Changes in 4.0 that could impact 3.x models.

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.

Changes in 4.0.0.38

(numerous minor bug fixes are not listed here)

Tables

  • Build 4.0.0.37 was inserting an extra comma at the end of table definitions. This causes a syntax error outside of build 4.0.0.37. If you load a model saved from 4.0.0.37 into 3.1 or 4.0.0.38, you will have to remove the trailing comma at the end of the table definition from expr edit mode.

When the table definitions are shown, you'll see a definition such as: 

Table(I,J)(34,25,1,1,1,2,34,33,22,22,11,)
                                       ^

Notice the extra comma at the end. You'll need to remove this manually. This comma was incorrectly inserted due to a problem in build 4.0.0.37 beta that we did not catch before releasing 4.0.0.37.


  • Numerous fixes involving SubTables.

Functions / Engine

  • Unique(A,I): Bug fix when A has indexes other than I (present in 4.0.0.37, not in 3.1)
  • MdTable: The default value for a cell whose coordinate does not appear in the original table is now Null (was formerly Undefined). This can be overridden by explicitly specifying the optional defaultVal parameter of MdTable.

Graphing

  • Statistics view now always defaults to the table view.
  • In continuous PDF/CDF views, the common index must now always be Step, the control for changing common index is hidden, and Step does not appear as a possible selecton on the Key pulldown.

Previous Beta Builds

Comments


You are not allowed to post comments.