What parts of MATLAB would you not miss?
Walter Roberson
on 21 Feb 2011
Latest activity Reply by Walter Roberson
on 20 Nov 2025 at 1:15
Are there parts of MATLAB that could disappear as far as you were concerned, things you don't need or which were "bad ideas" or which cause more trouble than they are worth in your experience?
One suggestion per answer please, so we can see how other people feel about the same matters.
110 Comments
Time Descending
The new limitation of figures to require every 'child' to either all have time zones or none have time zones. The old functions worked better where data could be plotted with and without time zones. When no time zone was assigned, it would simply match the data for the ones with time zones.
explicit expansion for '+' and '-', it wasn't there before.
Implicit expansion for + and - has been supported as long as implicit expansion has been supported.
Global variables. A crutch that causes more problems then they will ever solve.
You always have to have something that fills the role of global variables, even if with more inconvenient syntax.
Suppose you want a counter of the number of times I/O routines are called. You cannot attach the counter to individual instances of file descriptors: those would be individual counters, not total counters. You cannot attach the counter to the fopen() call somehow, because you are counting calls to multiple functions. You cannot attach the counter to a particular class instance because you are counting total calls over multiple class instances.
Can you attach the counter to a static class variable? Yes, if it is a sufficiently high level class. However, static class counters are just disguised global variables.
Suppose you want a class to keep track of all instances of the class, such as the ability of the graphics class to track all graphics objects so that you can use findobj() or findall((). You need the master list to be outside of any instance of the class... you either need a global variable or you need a class static variable... but class static variables are just fancy ways of implementing global variables.
UINT64, INT64. Yes, these classes give us a slightly larger integer range than a double. Better in my eyes would have just been to introduce a quad precision class, that would have solved more problems, and still have given a significantly larger FLINT than either of those integer classes.
You need uint64 to be able to pass opaque pointers around.
DET (and to some extent INV.) Yes, I use them both at times, as they both certainly have their uses. Yet they are both heavily misused by many. Do you see an inverse in an equation? We need inv! Need to test for singularity? Just use det! Det is the worst of the two of course in terms of frequency of misuse and the problems that arise from that misuse. I put the blame for this on the teacher who teaches a concept without also teaching the flaws.
RUN. Never had a use for it, never will. I think it encourages the writing of scripts too much instead of functions.
EVAL is evil. Top of the list for me. ;-)
I just thank god they never gave us goto in MATLAB.
cell arrays of character vectors. String arrays are better in may ways, but matlab is replete with cell arrays of character vectors. Too bad string arrays were not developed first in matlab.
You still need low-overhead methods of accessing individual characters. Continually having to call MID$(StringArray, startposition) or MID$(StringArray, startposition, length) is too much overhead (and necessarily returns a string array instead of an individual character.)
Tim Harmon: Depending on your license and what you need to use MATLAB to do, this may be possible. See MATLAB Online.
Installing MatLab
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