Page 33 - MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences

24 2 Introduction to MATLAB

Fig. 2.3 Screenshot of the MATLAB Text Editor showing the function average. The
function starts with a line containing the keyword function, the name of the function
average and the input variable x and the output variable y. The following lines contain
the output for help average, the copyright and version information as well as the actual
MATLAB code for computing the average using this function.

which displays the first block of contiguous comment lines. The fi rst execut-
able statement or blank line — as in our example — effectively ends the
help section and therefore the output of help. Now we are independent from
the variable names used in our function. We clear the workspace and defi ne
a new data vector.

clear
data = [3 6 2 -3 8];

We run our function by the statement

result = average(data);
This clearly illustrates the advantages of functions compared to scripts.
Typing

whos
results in

Name Size Bytes Class
data 1x5 40 double array
result 1x1 8 double array
Grand total is 6 elements using 48 bytes