Ox 5.0: new features and fixes

New features and enhancements
Fixed problems and new features in 5.0
OxGauss

New features and enhancements

• Multithreaded version (Ox Professional only) New command line option -rp to specify number of parallel threads. The default is to use the same as the number of cores/processors. Use -rp1 to force running on just one (serial instead of parallel).
• Can now have enum inside class declaration (behaving as static const decl member variables).
• Can now declare the same class twice (e.g. by accidentally including a header file twice, provided the declarations are identical)
• Modelbase::ForceYlag changed all types to Y_VAR for lagged Y variables. Now argument can be array of two values to specify which type to change (first is value to change to, second to change from). Modelbase::ReceiveModel() now only changes X_VAR to Y_VAR for lagged dep.vars using ForceYlag( {Y_VAR, X_VAR} );
• ismember and classname functions.
• improved invertgen documentation.
• Database::Grow and Modelbase::Grow now accept a negative argument to add observations at the beginning. Improved the created dates when extending a dated (weekly or 5 days per week) database.
• Database::Remove and Database::Rename now accept arrays of strings as arguments.
• dropr and insertr now also work on arrays.
• getfiles function
• OxPack:
  • Added "OxPackGetData"("DbFullPath")
  • Can now specify multiple extensions in OP_FILE_OPEN, e.g. "OxPackSpecialDialog"("OP_FILE_OPEN", 0, "*.in7;*.xls"
  • Added OP_VARIABLE (OxPackSpecialDialog) and CTL_VARIABLE (dialog control). This allows editing any Ox variable, including arrays and objects of classes. The type of components cannot be changed.
• Now can take the reference (address) of const variables (previously this would be a compile-time error). This allows using fscan("%v", &this) to read an object from disk. Also allowed is &this in OP_VARIABLE or CTL_VARIABLE.
• Faster sorting functions
• exclusion function with 3 arguments now sets idx to <> if the input is empty
• improvements for quanbeta and quanf, probf, tailf now allows n,m>0 instead of n,m>1.

Fixed problems in version 5.0:

• "%v" format: don't read/write static const members.
• public static data members were not directly accessible.
• In Ox 4 ranseed returns the 256 seeds. However, the generator has an additional state and carry integer, so this is not enough to get the exact state of the generator. Now ranseed will return 258 numbers: the 256 seeds followed by state and carry. This allows for the exact state to be replicated (defaults are used for seeds, state or carry that are missing).
• raninvgaussian could generate negative draws for very large mu, e.g. raninvgaussian(1,1,1e10,0.53). This was a problem with the original algorithm (Michael et al. 1976).
• Parser recognizes << and >>, however they could cause stack overflow (and subsequent crash). Now solved stack problem. Currently, it is a no-op: doesn't do anything.
• The following code Get() { return {"AA"}; } main(){ println(Get()[<0,0>]); } prints [0] = AA [1] = 0 instead of [0] = AA [1] = AA
• modelforc crashed after error message: Some lagged variables are not given at lag 0. Now better at taking zero coefficients in account.
• gammafact(.NaN) results in crash (infinite recursion) on Linux.
• The spline function with specified X and missing value(s) would crash. To fix this, the return value of the spline function when an X variable is specified is different: previously it was the sorted smooth values. Now the values are in the original position (i.e. corresponding to the input Y data).
  Spline against time was unaffected and is unchanged.
• OxPack:
  • SaveOptions did not get called when closing OxMetrics.
  • CTL_LABEL should not affect the column partitioning.
• DrawTMatrix with dates for X axis did not work in Ox Console (but worked with OxMetrics).

Ox version 5.00. © JA Doornik