Logical or not logical?

v = [1,2,3,4,5,6]

v > 4 gives back: 0 0 0 0 1 1

after this I wonder that

v(v > 4) is valid, but v([0,0,0,0,1,1]) is not a valid expression!

Maybe the problem is that 1 is true, not one, therefore the following has to be used:

v(logical([0,0,0,0,1,1]))

OK

but how it is possible that sum(v > 4) is valid and equal to 2?

if 1 is true, than true + true = true !?

Answer 1

[Adam Wyatt]

• All numbers are by default of class type "double" (unless specifically cast as int etc.).
• Logical values are of class "logical".
• Matlab displays 0 (false) and 1 (true) for logical values, but they are not equal to 0 or 1.
• Casting true or false to a number results in a value of 0 or 1
• This is standard convention, casting a logical (or boolean or bool) to a numeric data type results in either 0 or 1 (false or true) and casting a numeric data type as a logical (or boolean or bool) results in false for zero and true for anything else.

Check:

class(1)	% answer = double
class(true)	% answer = logical

When you write

v([0 0 0 0 1 1])

what you are actually saying is [v(0) v(0) v(0) v(0) v(1) v(1)], i.e. you are entering the index locations. For example

v([1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 1])	% answer = [1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 1];

is perfectly valid!!

You can perform arithmetic with logical values and logic with numeric values, but Matlab automatically casts it as the appropriate class.

Check

class(true + true)	% answer = double
class(v>3)	% answer = logical
class(v.*(v>3))	% answer = double
class(sum(v>3))	% answer = double
logical(5), class(logical(5))	% answer = 1, logical
logical(-5), class(logical(-5))	% answer = 1, logical
logical(0), class(logical(0))	% answer = 0, logical
logical(.1), class(logical(.1))	% answer = 1, logical

Basically logical(~=0)=true and logical(==0)=false, double(true)=1, double(false)=0 but double(1)~=logical(true)!