Programming

Accessing Object Data

You need to write methods for your class that provide access to an object's data. Accessor methods can use a variety of approaches, but all methods that change object data always accept an object as an input argument and return a new object with the data changed. This is necessary because MATLAB does not support passing arguments by reference (i.e., pointers). Functions can change only their private, temporary copy of an object. Therefore, to change an existing object, you must create a new one, and then replace the old one.

The following sections provide more detail about implementation techniques for the set, get, subsasgn, and subsref methods.

The display Method

The set and get Methods

© 1994-2005 The MathWorks, Inc.