Programming Features :: (MATLAB Release Notes)

MATLAB Release Notes

Programming Features

MATLAB 7.0.4 adds the following programming features and enhancements:

Memory-Mapping

Memory-mapping is a mechanism that maps a portion of a file, or an entire file, on disk to a range of addresses within an application's address space. The application can then access files on disk in the same way it accesses dynamic memory. This makes file reads and writes faster in comparison with using functions such as fread and fwrite.

Another advantage of using memory-mapping in MATLAB is that it enables you to access file data using standard MATLAB indexing operations. Once you have mapped a file to memory, you can read the contents of that file using the same type of MATLAB statements used to read variables from the MATLAB workspace. The contents of the mapped file appear as if they were an array in the currently active workspace. You simply index into this array to read or write the desired data from the file.

Memory-mapped files also provide a mechanism for sharing data between applications. This is achieved by having each application map sections of the same file. This feature can be used to transfer large data sets between MATLAB and other applications.

Enhancements to textscan

The textscan function originally read data only from files. As of this release, you can use textscan to read from strings as well.

Enhancements to xlsread

In this release, you can write a function and pass a handle to this function to xlsread. When xlsread executes, it reads from the spreadsheet, executes your function on the data read from the spreadsheet, and returns the final results to you.

You can use either of the following syntaxes:

num = xlsread('filename', ..., functionhandle)
[num, txt, raw, X] = xlsread('filename', ..., functionhandle)

See Example 5 -- Passing a Function Handle on the xlsread reference page.

New Format Option

You can display MATLAB output using two new formats: short eng and long eng. See the format reference page for more information.

short eng -- Displays output in an engineering format that has at least 5 digits and a power that is a multiple of three.
long eng -- Displays output in an engineering format that has exactly 16 significant digits and a power that is a multiple of three.

format short eng
pi
ans =
     3.1416e+000

format long eng
pi
ans =
     3.14159265358979e+000

Mathematics Features Graphics and 3-D Visualization Features