Making Decisions and Repeating Calculations

The most straightforward way of writing a program consists of typing in a sequence of instructions. Sometimes, however, decisions may have to be made according to certain specified requirements on what formula to use in the calculations, for instance, or even whether it is possible to continue for the given data. MATLAB has a selection of commands that will allow the user to take decisions and transfer the control to other parts of the program accordingly. Often we also find that there are instructions we want to repeat a number of times. Having to write the same instructions over and over while changing the data becomes very tedious but MATLAB has a very helpful command for that purpose. There are three control structures provided by MATLAB to enable this type of behaviour:
  1. IF statements
  2. Program Loops: FOR and WHILE statements

Exercises

There are two exercises associated with this section after reading about IF statements and Program loops you should try them both. Exercise 5 and Exercise 6.

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