Introduction to MATLAB: As seen in ENGS 20

With the C programming language we found that there were very few built-in functions. Anything we wanted to accomplish we had to program by ourselves. Using pointers and other such strategies we can work directly with the computer’s memory. We are therefore programming “close to the hardware”. Programming languages that allow working close to the hardware are also referred to as low level languages. One can, therefore, write code that is very portable (simply pass your C-program to someone else and as long as they have a C-compiler they can compile your code into an executable program). You can also create your own user-defined libraries to provide additional features.

With MATLAB, we will see that there are many built-in functions. Rather than having to decide on our own how large an array will be or how much memory we might need, MATLAB takes care of all these worries for us. We won’t even have to declare variables since MATLAB figures it out on its own. Such a language is also referred to as “high level”. In fact, we will see that the power of MATLAB comes from the built-in functions, graphics capabilities, interactivity, and on-line help. There are so many built-in functions that we’ll never come even close to learning about all of them.

Finally, MATLAB is a commercial product and costs money, unlike C, for which compilers are freely available.