what benefit of matlab

what are the benefit of matlab?,when I need it

[Andreas Goser]

Previously today they were multiple very similar questions by multiple "users". I suspect this was a kind of spam attack. If that was not your intention, please let me know.

Answer 1

[Andreas Goser]

In order to help you better, I recommend that you describe your application and maybe how you plan implementing it.

In general, you can think of MATLAB as a programming language. Many users who are not professional programmers see a benefit that you do not have to set up a complicate project, declare variables. You can even interactively import data files, process, vizualize and export them.

This is a very, very, very, very small piece of the story.

[Friedrich]

Thats true. Maybe this helps to compare MATLAB with other Programming languages ;)

http://www.lordkat.com/wiki/index.php/If_a_programming_language_was_a_boat%E2%80%A6

[Jan]

If the projects are getting large (e.g. > 250'000 lines of code plus documentation and automatic tests), it is a drawback, that there is no built-in project management. But of course an external source code management can assist to keep the overview over different releases.

Answer 2

[Jan]

A "benefit" means a comparison to another object. It is a completely different story if you compare MATLAB with NumPy/SciPy, with C or with Excel. It matters, if you are a student and want to learn how to solve a system of linear equations or if you implement the software of the break force booster of a new car - for both cases MATLAB has some important benefits, but different ones.

MATLAB is a very powerful programming language with a lot of toolboxes for different scientific fields. The user community (e.g. this forum and the FileExchange) and the technical support are extraordinarily active. This helps to apply the power of MATLAB, but learning to use all methods efficiently is still not trivial.

A lot of toolbox functions are shipped as source code ("M-file"), such that the users can 1. learn from the implementation and 2. create a copy of the function to insert individual modifications. This is extremly convenient and helpful.

The documentation of MATLAB is excellent - I haven't seen anything like this before.