MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Symbol Symbol Name Role Description Examples

[ ] Square brackets

• Array construction


• Array concatenation


• Empty matrix and array element deletion


• Multiple output argument assignment

Square brackets enable array construction and concatenation, creation of empty matrices, deletion

of array elements, and capturing values returned by a function.

• “Creating, Concatenating, and Expanding Matrices”


• horzcat


• vertcat

Construct a three-element vector:

X = [10 12 -3]

Add a new bottom row to a matrix:

A = rand(3);

A = [A; 10 20 30]

Create an empty matrix:

A = []

Delete a matrix column:

A(:,1) = []

Capture three output arguments from a function:

[C,iA,iB] = union(A,B)

{ } Curly brackets Cell array assignment and contents

Use curly braces to construct a cell array, or to access the contents of a particular cell in a cell

array.

• “Cell Arrays”

To construct a cell array, enclose all elements of the array in curly braces:

C = {[2.6 4.7 3.9], rand(8)*6, 'C. Coolidge'}

Index to a specific cell array element by enclosing all indices in curly braces:

A = C{4,7,2}

% Percent

• Comment


• Conversion specifier

The percent sign is most commonly used to indicate nonexecutable text within the body of a

program. This text is normally used to include comments in your code.

Some functions also interpret the percent sign as a conversion specifier.

Two percent signs, %%, serve as a cell delimiter as described in “Code Sections” on page 18-7.

• “Add Comments to Programs” on page 18-4

Add a comment to a block of code:

% The purpose of this loop is to compute

% the value of ...

Use conversion specifier with sprintf:

sprintf('%s = %d', name, value)

2 Program Components