On this page:
Versions 5.0, 4.62, 4.6, 4.5, 4.21, 4.2, 4.0, 3.x
If you are new to Hypatia you can skip this page and go directly to the next page, Installation.
Here are the most important changes, for more detailed information on recent and older updates see the page Release Notes in the Appendix.
A major new feature: label lines and the GOTO command make it possible to have loops within scripts (see chapters Scripts and Loops).
There is a new IFNOT ... THEN condition to complement IF ... THEN, and there are new 2-argument operators: AND, OR, XOR and NOR. IS+- can now be written instead of ISNOT0.
TIME can now be used in scripts outside of a loop, and the new command TIME0 sets the timer back to 0 (both can make sense with the new GOTO loops).
4.6 adds a feature that doesn't do anything that couldn't have been done before, but can simplify it:
& value value ... lets you write numbers or values of variables directly to the result file hy or the buffer -- see page Result Commands in chapter "Results". A few script examples were updated accordingly.
4.62 fixed a minor bug (## comment lines in scripts were displayed though they shouldn't have been), #: now writes an empty line to the screen, and the ABORT command can also be used when the script does not run in a loop.
The most important change is this shiny new HTML documentation which replaces the former PDF user manual. If installed correctly, you can open it from within Hypatia with the command HELP doc.
A number of bugs got fixed. None of them too serious, but some things had not worked the way they should -- for details see page Release Notes.
The operator a b MULTIPLE now returns the value of a divided by b if a is a positive multiple of b, not as previously just 1 for "true." Also, 0 b MULTIPLE now returns 0 ("false"), previously 0 b MULTIPLE had returned 1 ("true").
The a b GATE operator now uses the zero threshold instead of a fixed gate threshold of 1e-16 if b is 0. If the zero threshold is 0 then the gate threshold defaults to 1e-16.
If the command $ is used in a script it now returns an error message instead of just being ignored.
The command COPY now returns an error message when it is used in buffer mode.
The n-argument operator MED got renamed to MEDIAN.
The command EXIT as an alias of Q or QUIT was removed, use Q or QUIT to exit Hypatia.
A new 2-argument operator ABSLIMIT, a new pseudo constant PASSES, a new script command NOTHING.
The commands ENDLOOP and ABORT now allow optional comments.
A number of minor further improvements ...
The source files are not included in the hypatia.zip download file anymore, you can download them as the separate file hypatia-source.zip.
Hypatia has a new icon, see paragraph "License" on the previous page What is Hypatia?
A serious bug got fixed: the TAN operator had assumed its argument to be in radians, even when degrees mode was set.
New 2-argumment operator ROOT (which strangely had been missing so far), all comments can now include parentheses without causing errors.
The PROMPT command now allows a comment that is displayed to explain what should be entered.
Hypatia is now a 64-bit program -- this requires a 64-bit Windows system, but allows integer numbers to have up to 18 digits and floating point numbers to be shown with up to 15 digits.
New operators: ISPOSINT, DIGITS, LOG^ and IMOD, new oputput format commands: FSHORT / FLONG and F' ON / F' OFF.
New commands: EDINI, BUFFER DISCARD and INTEGER ON / OFF.
Effort has gone into tackling rounding issues and making the results of Hypatia’s floating point calculations accurate to the 15th digit (18 digits for integers).
The most important additions since versions 2.x were "user defined elements," buffer mode to drastically increase the speed of loops with thousands of write-to-disk operations, the compare operators >>, >=, << and <=, the ability of the ITEM operator to accept negative index values (counting backwards through the list of items), the TIME pseudo constant to measure the running time of loops, and the lakh, million and crore formats for large numbers.
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