Matlab 2012b Backwards Compatibility

Are there any known backwards compatability issues for Matlab 2012b? If so, are there any known solutions?

[Jing]

This is a broad question. And I guess there's different answers for different toolboxes.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Yes there are. Some of them are described in the release notes.

Answer 2

[Jan]

There are a lot of differences between Matlab 4.1 and 2012b, but much less between 2012a and 2012b. What periods of time are you interested in?

The public release notes and list of reported/fixed bugs do not contain all information. Some experiences have shown in the past, that there is a much larger number of changes, which are not reported in public, usually because they appear internally only and cannot be triggered by a documented function. But some undocumented changes do concern the user-land: FOPEN hast lost the Vax format, STRNCMP changed its reply if the strings are shorter than n, etc.

So the best estimation of the backward compatibility of a release is, if you install it (e.g. a trial version) and run the unit- and integration-tests of all your sub- and main-functions. There is no other reliable and exhaustive method to test the compatibility between a Matlab source and a Matlab release.

[Andreas Goser]

Note that all professional license types (academic as well as commercial) allow the installation of older releases. This means you do not need a trial for such a test.

Answer 3

[Andreas Goser]

From my perspective code or models from older releases should run in newer releases. My own experience with MATLAB and Simulink is a very high compatibilty in this direction.

In the other direction "backwards compatibility" it always is more difficult be desog. As when you include new features, you simply can't back port them. And with out new features, wehy using a new release instead of service packs?

Certainly I know the drivers for that requirement. People collaborate in a team and need to agree on a certain release. But what if you have your part already developed in a newer release? Right, you eed to back port it. In my experience, a significant part of the solution is the non technical part. It is the agreement on an older release instead of a newer release. But this may have commerical reasons, or negotiational aspects...