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MATLAB: the madness!

Jan 15, 2004 mcnut link
has anyone used the MATLAB application/scripting language?
what is its real purpose? no one at my school can tell me...
its like C, but without includes... and it is... SOO BORING

guess thats what I get for wanting to be an engineer...
Jan 15, 2004 toshiro link
heha!
join the club, mcnut! but seriously: matlab is pretty useful if you get the hang of it (i haven't as of yet). if only it'd run flawlessly under my osx...
Jan 15, 2004 lunitary link
eheh....:)

i can ask my brothers how to use it...they are bouth using it on regular basis:)
Jan 16, 2004 mcnut link
I mean... I can use it.. but so far it seems to be a dumbed down c... and I hate programming languages that are identical to another.. because it means that the time this company put into developing matlab, they could have made an addition to C/C++... and it would have been easier, and it wouldn't require a separate class...
Jan 17, 2004 EarthMkII link
MATLAB can handle arbitrarily precise floating points, big ints, and chew through arbitrarily huge matrices, and it's syntax is still simple.

MATLAB's purpose is primarily for statistical analysis (e.g. design testing, verification, and prototyping) and some DSP functions (again, testing/prototyping them) - it can take in very large data sets (thousands of data points) and provide graphical results very quickly, and more importantly, very simply.

If what you're doing is later going to be translated into a C/C++/Java project, then.. yeah, it's probably redundant. But if you're designing a circuit, automobile, or anything else that would be more efficient to model before building, it's quite useful.

All about using the right tool for the job.
Feb 06, 2004 Celebrim link
If you compare run times of a MATLAB program with an arbitarily written C program preforming the same mathimatical calculations, you'll find that the MATLAB program signifactly outperforms most peoples C code.

The C code that MATLAB scripts get interpretted into is very very clean and does alot of tricks to make sure no cycles get wasted. The average coder could not write code which is as fast as MATLAB, and the skilled coder would be wasting his time trying to do so.

For what it does, its a very good program.