Writing a MATLAB Program
- Using Command Window: Only one statement can be typed and executed at a time. It executes the statement when the enter key is pressed. This is mostly used for simple calculations. Note: ans is a default variable created by MATLAB that stores the output of the given computation.
- Using Editor: Multiple lines of code can be written here and only after pressing the run button (or F5) will the code be executed. It is always a good practice to write clc, clear and close all in the beginning of the program.Note: Statements ending with a semicolon will not be displayed in the command window, however, their values will be displayed in the workspace. Any statement followed by % in MATLAB is considered as a comment
- Vector Operations: Operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division can be done using a single command instead of multiple loops
We can also extract separate rows and columns by using the colon(:) operator. Consider a matrix A of size 3X3. The following commands can be used to extract rows and columns from Matrix A
Command | Description |
---|---|
A(:, n) | To extract the elements of all rows in column n of the matrix |
A(m, : ) | To extract the elements of all columns in row m of the matrix |
A(:, m:n) | To extract the elements of all rows between columns m and n of the matrix |
A(m:n, : ) | To extract the elements of all columns between rows m and n of the matrix |
A(p:q, m:n) | To extract the elements of rows between p and q and columns between m and n of the matrix |
A(m, n) | To extract the elements of row m and column n |
Introduction to MATLAB
MATLAB stands for Matrix Laboratory. It is a high-performance language that is used for technical computing. It was developed by Cleve Molar of the company MathWorks.Inc in the year 1984.It is written in C, C++, Java. It allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions, implementation of algorithms and creation of user interfaces.