General Information

Quick Overview

This chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive manual of MATLAB®. Our sole aim is to provide sufficient information to give you a good start. If you are familiar with another computer language, and we assume that you are, it is not difficult to pick up the rest as you go.

MATLAB is a high-level computer language for scientific computing and data visualization built around an interactive programming environment. It is becoming the premiere platform for scientific computing at educational institutions and research establishments. The great advantage of an interactive system is that programs can be tested and debugged quickly, allowing the user to concentrate more on the principles behind the program and less on programming itself. Since there is no need to compile, link and execute after each correction, MATLAB programs can be developed in much shorter time than equivalent FORTRAN or C programs. On the negative side, MATLAB does not produce stand-alone applications—the programs can be run only on computers that have MATLAB installed.

MATLAB has other advantages over mainstream languages that contribute to rapid program development:

• MATLAB contains a large number of functions that access proven numerical libraries, such as LINPACK and EISPACK. This means that many common tasks (e.g., solution of simultaneous equations) can be accomplished with a single function call.

• There is extensive graphics support that allows the results of computations to be plotted with a few statements.

• All numerical objects are treated as double-precision arrays. Thus there is no need to declare data types and carry out type conversions.