Does different MATLAB versions handle array arithmetic differently ?

In a previous project I did something like

x = randn(N,3);    % N > 1
x = x - [x,y,z];   % remove "bias", x,y,z are scalars

Im am pretty sure that this was allowed in a previous version of MATLAB. Am I wrong ?

Answer 1

[John D'Errico]

In R2016 (not sure if it was a or b. I think b, but not really relevant, so will not check.) they introduced the capability to expand singleton dimensions for operations like this.

So now things like this work:

M = magic(3)
M =
     8     1     6
     3     5     7
     4     9     2

M - mean(M)
ans =
     3    -4     1
    -2     0     2
    -1     4    -3

Which is as you describe. Prior to the change, you needed to use bsxfun to do that, and before bsxfun existed, you had to expand the vector yourself, using a tool like repmat.

[James Tursa]

Implicit expansion introduced in R2016b.