Version 0.8 (now with charts!) and a new website

[Gaëtan de Menten]

I am pleased to announce that version 0.8 of LIAM2 is now available. The
website was also completely redesigned.

The highlights of this release are:
- new charting functions to create different kinds of charts: bar
charts, plots, stacked plots, pie charts, scatter plots, ... See the
change log (linked below) for details.
- bundling and integration of an hdf5 viewer (ViTables) as another way
to explore the input or output data.

More details and the complete list of changes are available below. Note
that this final release is completely identical to the 0.8-rc1 release.

This new release can be downloaded on our website:
http://liam2.plan.be

As always, *any* feedback is very welcome, preferably on the liam2-users
mailing list: liam2...@googlegroups.com (you need to register to be
able to post).

Enjoy!

New features
------------

* added a few functions to create charts (courtesy of `matplotlib
<http://matplotlib.org>`_): bar, plot, pie, stackplot, boxplot and
scatter.
As with all other functions in liam2, they are available both during a
simulation and in the interactive console. The charts can either be
visualized directly or saved to a file. See the :ref:`charts section
<charts>`
for details.

* added a "view" command line option to LIAM2 to open ViTables (an hdf5
viewer) as well as a corresponding menu entry and keyboard shortcut
(F9) in
Notepad++. It is meant to be used when editing a *model* file, and it
will
open both the input dataset and the result file (if any).

* document boolean aggregate functions: all() and any() which were
added in 0.7 but were not yet documented.

* added *assertFalse* assert function.

Miscellaneous improvements
--------------------------

* improved the first few demonstration models quite a bit. A recommended
read
for all users.

* added precisions in the documentation of align() based on Alexis Eidelman
suggestions.

* made a few more error messages a bit more useful by displaying the line
where the error occurred.

* sped up global[array_expr].

* give a hint to use assertNanEqual when it would make a failing assertEqual
pass.

* implemented global[slice_expr] (eg. MINR[period: period+2]). When the
slice bounds are arrays (different for each individual) and the slice
length is not constant (not the same for all individuals),
it returns a special array with an extremely limited set of supported
operations: only aggregates on axis=1 are implemented.

* include the documentation only in HTML Help format (.chm) in the bundle.
.pdf and "normal" html are still available as separate downloads on the
website.

* removed the predictor keyword support (it now raises an exception instead
of a warning).

* adapted the release script since our move to git and converted it to
Python.

Fixes
-----

* fixed the "syntax upgrade" script by removing a special case for
grpmin and
grpmax as it was in fact not needed and caused problems when the
expression
being aggregated contained parentheses.
--
Gaëtan de Menten

Federal Planning Bureau
Economic Analyses & Forecasts
Avenue des Arts, 47-49 | 1000 Brussels
tel. +32 (0)2 507 7459
fax +32 (0)2 507 7373
email : g...@plan.be | www.plan.be