A Storie About MATLAB In Ye Olden Dayes: The joy of file naming standards (or lack thereof)
Matt Tearle
on 13 Oct 2025 at 14:29
Inspired by @xingxingcui's post about old MATLAB versions and @유장's post about an old Easter egg, I thought it might be fun to share some MATLAB-Old-Timer Stories™.
Back in the early 90s, MATLAB had been ported to MacOS, but there were some interesting wrinkles. One that kept me earning my money as a computer lab tutor was that MATLAB required file names to follow Windows standards - no spaces or other special characters. But on a Mac, nothing stopped you from naming your script "hello world - 123.m". The problem came when you tried to run it. MATLAB was essentially doing an eval on the script name, assuming the file name would follow Windows (and MATLAB) naming rules.
So now imagine a lab full of students taking a university course. As is common in many universities, the course was given a numeric code. For whatever historical reason, my school at that time was also using numeric codes for the departments. Despite being told the rules for naming scripts, many students would default to something like "26.165 - 1.1" for problem one on HW1 for the intro applied math course 26.165.
No matter what they did in their script, when they ran it, MATLAB would just say "ans = 25.0650".
Nothing brings you more MATLAB-god credibility as a student tutor than walking over to someone's computer, taking one look at their output, saying "rename your file", and walking away like a boss.
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The pre-OS X version of MATLAB was interesting for many reasons. Although Mathworks stopped officially supported the Mac version (around 2000?), it remained more powerful than the Windows version in many ways. Memory management was much better--even through 2002-2003, I had to periodicaly quit and restart MATLAB because Windows would not fully clear large arrays in a session. It was also much easier to generate QuickTime animations with the Mac version.
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