In addition to the MATLAB documentation, which is quite good, and the demos that ship with MATLAB, you might look for books here:

http://www.mathworks.com/support/books/

–Loren

Natural notation in Matlab could be enhanced by allowing Ruby [ http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ ] style blocks and iterators. In Ruby every statment is an expression and functions can have blocks implicitly passed to them by providing a ”do” keyword after the function call. The do keyword opens a block and end closes it. The last expression evaluated is the return value of the block.

The observation to make is that for loops and while loops are just specialized cases of iterators. Ruby allows the user to create any type of iterator they can imagine. For example here is the usage of an iterator that generates first 10 fibonacci numbers and only prints them if they are greater than 10;

fib(10) do |f|
   if f > 10
      print(f)
   end
end

instead of

for i = 1:10
   f = fib(i) % Extra line not needed!
   if f > 10
      print(f)
   end
end

But iterators are not limited to generating sequential items. They could be used to allow the user to write natural mathematical notation. In Ruby if the quad function were defined you could do a triple integration something like this. ( Performance considerations excluded! )

r = Math.quad(0, 1) do |x|
  Math.quad(0, 2) do |y|
    Math.quad(0,3) do |z|
       if x > 0
          x^2 + y^2 + y^2
       else
          x + y + z
       end
    end
  end
end

To do the same in Matlab would require a great deal of boiler plate code including named nested functions. You can observe very often in the use of nested functions that the function is only ever used once!

I have implemented such an extension to Matlab for my templating engine and you can have a look at it in action at

http://xtargets.com/cms/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=18

It is a change to the Matlab language that compiles into Matlab and makes generating text/code/html/xml etc really easy from Matlab.

Regards

Brad