Re:

[Shai Ayal]

Francesco Potorti` wrote:
> > 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 agree. I use octave because of these benifits.

> > 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.

true, but I think someone who has some experience with matlab/octave 
will understand at once that this question is all about avoiding the 
for-loop

Shai



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