Page 60 - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users

Presenting Your Results 41

Judging from the output, you can expect to find the answer to the question we
posed above by typing sinelimit(10). Try it!

Loops

A loop specifies that a command or group of commands should be repeated
several times. The easiest way to create a loop is to use a for statement. Here
is a simple example that computes and displays 10! = 10 · 9 · 8 ··· 2 · 1:

f=1;
for n = 2:10
f = f*n;
end
f
The loop begins with the for statement and ends withthe end statement. The
command between those statements is executed a total of nine times, once for
eachvalue of n from 2 to 10. We used a semicolon to suppress intermediate
output within the loop. To see the final output, we then needed to type f after
the end of the loop. Without the semicolon, MATLAB would display each of
the intermediate values 2!, 3!, ... .
We have presented the loop above as you might type it into an M-file; inden-
tation is not required by MATLAB, but it helps human readers distinguish the
commands within the loop. If you type the commands above directly to the
MATLAB prompt, you will not see a new prompt after entering the for state-
ment. You should continue typing, and after you enter the end statement,
MATLAB will evaluate the entire loop and display a new prompt.
If you use a loop in a script M-file with echo on in effect, the commands will
be echoed every time through the loop. You can avoid this by inserting the
command echo off just before the end statement and inserting echo on
just afterward; then each command in the loop (except end) will be echoed
once.

Presenting Your Results

Sometimes you may want to show other people the results of a script M-file
that you have created. For a polished presentation, you should use an M-book,
as described in Chapter 6, or import your results into another program, such