Glossary - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users - page 299

Glossary

We present here the most commonly used MATLAB objects in six categories:
operators, built-in constants, built-in functions, commands, graphics com-
mands, and MATLAB programming constructs. Though MATLAB does
not distinguishbetween commands and functions, it is convenient to think
of a MATLAB function as we normally think of mathematical functions. A
MATLAB function is something that can be evaluated or plotted; a com-
mand is something that manipulates data or expressions or that initiates a
process.
We list each operator, function, and command together with a short
description of its effect, followed by one or more examples. Many MATLAB
commands can appear in a number of different forms, because you can apply
them to different kinds of objects. In our examples, we have illustrated the
most commonly used forms of the commands. Many commands also have nu-
merous optional arguments; in this glossary, we have only included some very
common options. You can find a full description of all forms of a command,
and get a more complete accounting of all the optional arguments available
for it, by reading the help text — which you can access either by typing help
<commandname> or by invoking the Help Browser, shown in Figure G-1.
This glossary does not contain a comprehensive list of MATLAB commands.
We have selected the commands that we feel are most important. You can find
a comprehensive list in the Help Browser. The Help Browser is accessible
from the Command Window by typing helpdesk or helpwin , or from the
LaunchPad window in your Desktop under MATLAB : Help. Exactly what
commands are covered in your documentation depends on your installation, in
particular which toolboxes and what parts of the overall documentation files
you installed.

See Online Help in Chapter 2 for a detailed description of the Help Browser.

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