Page 120 - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users

Chapter 7

MATLAB Programming

Every time you create an M-file, you are writing a computer program using
the MATLAB programming language. You can do quite a lot in MATLAB
using no more than the most basic programming techniques that we have
already introduced. In particular, we discussed simple loops (using for) and
a rudimentary approach to debugging in Chapter 3. In this chapter, we will
cover some further programming commands and techniques that are useful
for attacking more complicated problems withMATLAB. If you are already
familiar withanother programming language, muchof this material will be
quite easy for you to pick up!

Many MATLAB commands are themselves M-files, which you can examine
using type or edit (for example, enter type isprime to see the M-file for
the command isprime). You can learn a lot about MATLAB programming
techniques by inspecting the built-in M-files.

Branching

For many user-defined functions, you can use a function M-file that executes
the same sequence of commands for each input. However, one often wants a
function to perform a different sequence of commands in different cases, de-
pending on the input. You can accomplish this with a branching command, and
as in many other programming languages, branching in MATLAB is usually
done withthe command if, which we will discuss now. Later we will describe
the other main branching command, switch.

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