Matvec Users’ Guide

Chapter 1
A Tour of Matvec
1.1 Running Matvec
1.1.1 Interactively
On most computer systems, Matvec can be invoked on your terminal by entering the shell command matvec.
Then Matvec will start with an initial message similar to:
matvec 0.01, University of Illinois
type ? (or xman or help or xhelp) for on-line help
and then a prompt >
type a=[1,2,3].
1.1.2 From a script
next to the cursor. Now Matvec is ready for you to try something out. For instance,
If you want to accomplish a little bit complicated job, then it is a better idea to write a script file using
Matvec language. Suppose your script file named try.mv contains the following Matvec statements
A = [3,2,1; 4,6,5; 7,8,9];
A.det()
Then you can type matvec try.mv at your computer system prompt to get the determinant of matrix A.
You can also redirect the output from Matvec to a file using UNIX redirect mechanism. For instance, under
C-shell, the command
matvec try.me >try.out&
will create a file try.out which contains standard output from Matvec. The last character & tells the computer
to run Matvec in background.
1.1.3 From standard input
Try the following command at your computer system prompt:
cat try.mv |matvec
1.2 Special Attention
There are a few of things to which you have to pay a special attention:
• anything after # or // to the end of a line is treated as comments, thus ignored by Matvec interpreter.
For multi-line comments, use /* ... */
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