Re:

[Francesco Potorti`]

>I think this is a real-world problem. It is probably the biggest flaw in 
>the matlab language, making you write programs which use unintuitive and 
>hard to understand tricks just to avoid for-loops. As a real world 
>example, have a look at the code for hist.m in octave. Instead of a ~N 
>for-loop, it uses NlogN sorting just because sort is done in C and thus 
>is faster.

I don't really think that this is a flaw.  The Octave (Matlab) language
is a matrix language, which is duly optimised for doing matrix
computations.  This is exactly what one would expect from a matrix
language.  Being fast at doing non-matrix operations is certainly an
added benefit, not the foremost objective of the language.

Do you agree?

>I think that for-loops are an essential part of any programming 
>language, and avoiding them has unfortunately become the hallmark of 
>good matlab programming. When conducting job interviews for positions 
>for which matlab/octave is relevant, one of my questions is:
>
>how would you calculate a 10 sample running average on a 100 element vector?

I wouldn't say that using a for loop for such a small vector is wrong,
unless the operation is to be done many times.

-- 
Francesco Potortì (ricercatore)        Voice: +39 050 315 3058 (op.2111)
ISTI - Area della ricerca CNR          Fax:   +39 050 313 8091
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