Desktop Tools and Development Environment Upgrade Issues

MATLAB Release Notes

Desktop Tools and Development Environment Upgrade Issues

The issues involved in upgrading from MATLAB 6.5 to MATLAB 7.0, in terms of desktop tools and development environment features, are discussed below.

Desktop and General Changes

The terminal function was removed.
The data returned by the license command is now sorted in alphabetical order and uses only lowercase characters.

Command Window

Parentheses matching is not supported.
There is a no longer a preference allowing you to limit the number of tab completions that display. MATLAB always displays all possible completions.

Help Browser

The web function no longer opens the specified URL in the Help browser by default, but instead opens the page in the MATLAB Web browser. Use the -helpbrowser option to open the page in the Help browser.
Favorites are not migrated from the previous version.
If you start MATLAB using the -nojvm option, you cannot view the HTML documentation files from within MATLAB. The docopt function no longer supports that option. You can view the HTML documentation files at the MathWorks Web site.

File Operations, Workspace, and Path

MATLAB no longer considers built-in functions differently from any other M-files on the search path. MATLAB now looks for a given name first as a variable, then as an M-file in the current directory, and finally as an M-file on the search path. Previously MATLAB looked for a given name as a built-in function after looking for it as a variable.

If you have a function name that is the same as a MATLAB built-in function, your function might run instead of the built-in function, whereas in previous releases the built-in function would have run. For the built-in function to run, remove or rename your function, or change the directory order in the search path.

The path2rc function has been replaced by a new function, savepath. If you use path2rc, it will run savepath instead. The new function, savepath, performs the same actions as path2rc did, but uses a more intuitive name. In addition, savepath is case-sensitive on PC platforms, whereas path2rc was not. Use savepath instead of path2rc, and replace existing instances of path2rc with savepath.

Editing and Debugging

Because of the new block comment symbols, if you have any files with lines that consist only of %{ and %}, they might be misinterpreted as block comment start and end symbols, and might cause errors in your file.
Because of the new symbols for cell publishing, if you have any files with lines that consist only of %%, those lines might be misinterpreted as the start of a cell. Your files will still run without problems, but if you publish the M-files, you might need to modify those lines.
The dbstack function was updated to support nested functions. If you use dbstack in M-files, you might need to update your files because of this change. When you run dbstack and return results to a structure, there are now three fields, whereas in previous versions, there were only two fields. The fields are:

file, the file in which the function appears
name, the function name within the file
line, the line number in the function

The file field does not contain a complete pathname, as the name field did in previous versions. To get the complete pathname, use dbstack('-completenames').

The dbstatus function was updated to support conditional breakpoints. As a result there have been changes to some of the fields in the structure returned with s = dbstatus(...). If you use dbstatus in M-files, you might need to update your files because of this change. For details on the new format, see the dbstatus reference page.

Source Control

In MATLAB 6.5 (R13) and MATLAB 7.0 (R14), only source control systems that comply with the Microsoft Common Source Control standard are supported. If there is a compliant source control system installed on your machine, it will be listed in the Source Control options in the MATLAB Preferences dialog.

There are several vendors who provide and interface into Revision Control Systems (RCS), Concurrent Versions System (CVS), and other such tools using Microsoft Source Code Control API. ComponentSoftware provides one such interface layer.

Upgrading from an Earlier Release Mathematics Upgrade Issues