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MATLAB, short for "Matrix Laboratory", refers to a both a numerical computing environment and its core programming language. Created by The MathWorks, MATLAB allows one to easily manipulate matrices, plot functions and data, implement algorithms, create user interfaces, and interface with programs in other languages. Although it specializes in numerical computing, an optional toolbox interfaces with the Maple symbolic engine, making it a full computer algebra system. It is used by more than 1,000,000 people in industry and academia and runs on most modern operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, Linux and Unix.
History
The language was invented by Cleve Moler in the late 1970s, then chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico. He designed it to give his students access to LINPACK and EISPACK without having to learn Fortran. It soon spread to other universities and found a strong audience within the applied mathematics community. Jack Little, an engineer, was exposed to it during a visit Cleve Moler made to Stanford University in 1983. Recognizing its commercial potential, he joined with Cleve Moler and Steve Bangert. They rewrote MATLAB in C and founded The MathWorks in 1984 to continue its development. These rewritten libraries were lovingly known as JACKPAC. MATLAB was first adopted by control design engineers, Jack Little's specialty, but quickly spread to many other domains. It is also used in education, in particular the teaching of linear algebra and numerical analysis
Example MATLAB code
This code, excerpted from the function magic.m, creates a magic square M for odd values of n.
[J,I] = meshgrid(1:n);
A = mod(I+J-(n+3)/2,n);
B = mod(I+2*J-2,n);
M = n*A + B + 1;
Comparison with Mathematica
MATLAB's primary competitor is commonly believed to be the symbolic computation program Mathematica, however MathWorkers (that is how MathWorks employees refer to themselves) consider Microsoft Excel to be their most frequent competitor. MATLAB is more convenient for numerical analysis and linear algebra than Mathematica, and is frequently used in the engineering community. Mathematica on the other hand has superior symbolic manipulation, making it popular among physicists. Another fundamental difference is that while MATLAB accepts scripts in a language very close to BASIC, Mathematica uses its own functional language
Other Alternatives
Of course, there are alternatives for doing numerics. Many of them are Free software.
- Different designs
- R
- APL descendants such as the J programming language
- Python, when used in combination with libraries such as Numeric Python and SciPy, also provides similar functionality.
- IDL, the Interactive Data Language, was once a commercial competitor with MATLAB, and remains functionally competitive in many regards, although its market share has slipped drastically.
- If you want to manage larger projects you may also consider general purpose languages supporting static typing and modularization such as Modula-3, Haskell, Ada, Java calling special purpose libraries such as GNU Scientific Library (GSL) (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/), LAPACK (http://www.netlib.org/lapack/), FFTW (http://www.fftw.org/), PLPlot (http://plplot.sourceforge.net/) e.g. with SWIG (http://www.swig.org/) generated interfaces
External links
de:Matlab sv:MATLAB fr:MATLAB
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