Max or Min position in a matrix

Used to obtain the particular position where a maximum or minimum occurs in a matrix.

Description

Provide a matrix of which you would like to obtain the position where its maximum or minimum occurs. By specifying your desire for the max or min position, simply run the program to obtain it.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.9 (2009b)

[John D'Errico]

This has SOME good features. What do I like about it? It does have help, to some extent. But the help could be a bit better. Here is what you get when you use help on this function:

>> help findit
  To obtain the position of either the maximum or minimum element in a vector
 
  INMAT specifies the input matrix
  Use OPT specify your choice of obtaining a maximum or minimum
  Set OPT=1 when trying to obtain the maximum
  Set OPT=2 when trying to obtain the minimum
 
 
  Oluwadamilola (Damie) Martins Ogunbiyi
  University of Maryland College Park
  Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  Communications and Signal Processing
  08-March-2010
  Copyright 2009-2010 Black Ace of Diamonds.

See that there is an H1 line in the help block. I like that. There is a simple description of the arguments. But what order do they go in? I might guess that INMAT is the first argument, because it is mentioned first. But there is no other hint.

Next, does this require that OPT be supplied? Is OPT and optional argument? If so, then it should have a default, and the help should tell us what is the default. As it turns out, there is no default value for opt.

I do like that there is a check for opt being a valid argument.

A good thing to do when you write help is to give an example of use. Show what SHOULD happen when you call your function on some simple test array, like magic(3).

Another good thing to put in your help is a see also line.

It does seem silly to me that when you type help for this code, it gives you more information about the author than it does about the function itself.

How about the code itself? Sadly, this part is TERRIBLE. Why in the name of god and little green apples did the author use nested loops to do this?

See that min and max would have given all the information the author needed, with a final call to ind2sub to get the actual subscripts of the result. Worse, the author actually calls min or max before the loop itself!!!!!!!!

My rating for this would have been about 3.5 stars before I got into the coding style itself. But solving the problem with nested loops is a ridiculous silly choice.