PDL 2.083 released and updates from a year of PDLing

[zmughal]

Crossposted from https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/1344vs5/pdl_2083_released_and_updates_from_a_year_of/

A new release of PDL is out!

A summary of changes over the last year since PDL 2.077:

• PDL::IO::STL: read and write STL (stereolithography format) files that are used in applications such as 3D printing.
• Improvements to the C API and PP code generator (many in order to support writing bindings to external non-PDL code).
• Incorporation of several of Bryan Jurish's PDL::VectorValued functions into the core PDL distribution. Thank you Bryan Jurish!
• Continuing improvements to add complex number support to more PDL functions such as conv2d() and interpolate(). Thank you W. Luis Mochán & Eric Wheeler!
• Improvements to handling of badvals, NaNs, and empty ndarrays for various functions (Ufunc, setops, whereND, append). Thanks to Kieron Taylor & James Cook!
• Improvements to documentation generation for non-core PDL modules.
• New sound demo by Harald Jörg!

And finally thanks to all the folks reporting bugs!

But that's not all! There have been several exciting releases in the broader World of PDL:

• Eric Wheeler has released two modules
  • PDL::IO::Touchstone: read and write Touchstone files which are used to deal with complex-valued RF sample data.
  • PDL::Opt::Simplex::Simple: simple interface to simplex optimization.
• Vikas N. Kumar's and kmx's PDL::Finance::TA has seen many improvements. You can use it through a Prima-based GUI at App::financeta.
• Ingo Schmid and Ed (@mohawk2) have released a PDL interface for OpenCV at PDL::OpenCV. Many of the updates to the code generation in the past year have been motivated by this release!
• (self-plug) AI::TensorFlow::Libtensorflow: bindings to the low-level libtensorflow deep learning library. Several demos are available in the release and usable via Docker.
• David Mertens has graciously given co-maint out for PDL::Drawing::Prima and PDL::Graphics::Prima. With many fixes to bring the code up to date with the latest Prima thanks to Dmitry Karasik, this now works again for use as a plotting engine for PDL::Graphics::Simple. There are also some updates to David's https://github.com/PDLPorters/App-Prima-REPL to bring it up to date.
• Dmitry Karasik has also released updates to PDL::PrimaImage.
• Several updates to PDL::Graphics::Gnuplot including use of Alien::Gnuplot to install a working Gnuplot.