Basics of MATLAB and Beyond

1.5 The Colon OperatorTo generate a vector of equally-spaced elements matlab provides thecolon operator. Try the following commands:1:50:2:100:.1:2*piThe syntax x:y means roughly “generate the ordered set of numbersfrom x to y with increment 1 between them.” The syntax x:d:y meansroughly “generate the ordered set of numbers from x to y with incrementd between them.”1.6 LinspaceTo 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 70 0.1111 0.2222 0.3333 0.4444 0.5556 0.6667Columns 8 through 100.7778 0.8889 1.0000generates 10 evenly spaced points from 0 to 1. Typing linspace(start,stop ) will generate a vector of 100 points.1.7 Plotting VectorsWhereas other computer languages, such as Fortran, work on numbersone at a time, an advantage of matlab is that it handles the matrix asa 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 = 1,100X(I) = 2*PI*I/100Y(I) = SIN(X(I))100 CONTINUEPLOT(X,Y)Here we assume that we have access to a Fortran plotting packagein which PLOT(X,Y) makes sense. In matlab we can get our plot bytyping:c○ 2000 by CRC Press LLC