*This list is being expanded

• The period . operator.

  You put the . in front of an operator like ^ or * to get “element by element” operation behavior. Its best explained by example.

  Say you have a row matrix called ‘x’ that has 10000 values in it.

  You want a plot of y = x², so you need to create another row vector to save values of y to put those values in.

  Instead of writing a loop like:

  for( i = 1:length(x) )
  y(i) = x(i)^2;
  end

  Just use the special . notation and write:

  x = -3:0.01:3;
  y = x.^(2);

  Here, .^ means to raise every element of x to the power of 2, not to try to raise the ENTIRE matrix to the power 2 (which clearly generates an error).

  matlab docs ref