Programming and Data Types

Command/Function Duality

MATLAB commands are statements like

load
help

Many commands accept modifiers that specify operands.

load August17.dat
help magic
type rank

An alternate method of supplying the command modifiers makes them string arguments of functions.

load('August17.dat')
help('magic')
type('rank')

This is MATLAB's command/function duality. Any command of the form

command argument

can also be written in the functional form

command('argument')

The advantage of the functional approach comes when the string argument is constructed from other pieces. The following example processes multiple data files, August1.dat, August2.dat, and so on. It uses the function int2str, which converts an integer to a character string, to help build the filename.

for d = 1:31
   s = ['August' int2str(d) '.dat']
   load(s)
% Process the contents of the d-th file
end

String Evaluation

Empty Matrices