Repeating an action many times with different random conditions

[joseph . wakeling]

Hello all,

I'm wondering if Octave has a function to repeat a given statement  
many times with different random (or non-random) cases, and output the  
results to an array.

Essentially what I'm looking for is something similar to the  
"replicate" function in R.  Of course, it's possible to just use a for  
loop, but in my experience this is slow ... :-(

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Best wishes,

    -- Joe