Vectors and Vector Operators

In Chapter 1 we covered some of the most basic aspects of MATLAB® and Octave, and have seen how the software can be used as a simple calculator to do arithmetics, as well as performing operations using built-in functions. Nonethe- less, both MATLAB and Octave are far more powerful than that, and to unlock this power it is important to familiarise ourselves with the objects that the software is able to manip- ulate. In this chapter we will see how to deal with vectors For the purposes of using MATLAB and Octave, we can think of a vector as an arrangement of elements in a column or a row. In that manner, vectors are effectively lists of numbers for example, separated by either commas or spaces. The number of entries is known as the “length” of “elements” into MATLAB and Octave we type the following in the In the example above we have left a space between the first could have done this explicitly with a comma, as shown in We must be careful with the use of spaces as they can change the number of elements in a vector and their value.