Page 16 - Basics of MATLAB and Beyond

1.5 The Colon Operator
To generate a vector of equally-spaced elements matlab provides the
colon operator. Try the following commands:

1:5
0:2:10
0:.1:2*pi
The syntax x:y means roughly “generate the ordered set of numbers
from x to y with increment 1 between them.” The syntax x:d:y means
roughly “generate the ordered set of numbers from x to y with increment
d between them.”

1.6 Linspace

To generate a vector of evenly spaced points between two end points,
you can use the function linspace(start,stop,npoints ):

>> x = linspace(0,1,10)
x =
Columns 1 through 7
0 0.1111 0.2222 0.3333 0.4444 0.5556 0.6667
Columns 8 through 10
0.7778 0.8889 1.0000

generates 10 evenly spaced points from 0 to 1. Typing linspace(start,
stop ) will generate a vector of 100 points.

1.7 Plotting Vectors

Whereas other computer languages, such as Fortran, work on numbers
one at a time, an advantage of matlab is that it handles the matrix as
a single unit. Let us consider an example that shows why this is useful.
Imagine you want to plot the function y = sin x for x between 0 and 2π.
A Fortran code to do this might look like this:
DIMENSION X(100),Y(100)
PI = 4*ATAN(1)
DO 100 I = 1,100
X(I) = 2*PI*I/100
Y(I) = SIN(X(I))
100 CONTINUE
PLOT(X,Y)

Here we assume that we have access to a Fortran plotting package
in which PLOT(X,Y) makes sense. In matlab we can get our plot by
typing:

c 2000 by CRC Press LLC