One of the things I really hate with Matlab is that when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you stand a good chance not to find it. Hmm, this doesn’t sound right, let me rephrase: when you don’t know how what you’re looking for is called in Matlab, you stand a good chance not to find it.
Today, for example, I wanted to retrieve the file that implements a specific function. Since I’m using several free toolboxes I downloaded from the internet, I wanted to know whether the function is part of the Matlab installation or of one of the toolboxes. I started by typing:
>> help pca
Which gave me a complete description for the 'pca' function. Yet, it didn’t provide its source. I couldn’t find any allusion to this function in the Help, which indicates there is a good chance that this method comes from an external toolbox. Note however that it’s not always the case – some functions that are part of the installation are not easy to locate in the Help window, even if you know their exact name.
After several minutes of frustration I discovered that the following line:
>> which pca
returns the full path of the file that implements the function ‘pca’ (and indeed it was from an external toolbox).
My frustration was – how the h… am I supposed to know that the function that provides this information is called ‘which’ ??? My situation was even better than most cases, because I vaguely remembered that there is such a function. Sometimes you don’t even know exactly how you can do what you actually want to do, and then looking it out in the Help becomes a real nightmare.
That’s all, just had to get this off my chest…
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