Re: Who said strong typing is a benefit?

[nma124@hotmail.com (steve_H)]

Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote in message news:<87lm52eaa9.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>...
> Jim Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> writes:
> 
> > My favorite response to this kind of question is "what will Matlab do
> > when you take the square root of a string?"
>  
> >> sqrt ('@Q')
> 
> ans =
> 
>      8     9
> 
> >> 
> 
> Ugh.  Consistent, but useless.
> 
 
When not sure if the variable is string or not, use:

"� help ischar

 ISCHAR  True for character array (string).
    ISCHAR(S) returns 1 if S is a character array and 0 otherwise.
 
    See also CHAR."

When using anything other than the basic data type in matlab (which is
a double), then things do not look so pretty any more. But almost 
everything in matlab is a double (ok, except strings). from the simple 
loop counter variable to the 20 MB sparse matrix to the index into an 
array of only 5 elements, they are all of type double as default.