Question

I have two vectors in the form of columns, e.g.:

a = 1
    2
    3
    4
    5

b = 2
    1
    3
    5
    4

I am using the following code to retrieve the product of each:

for i = 1 : length(a)
    ab(i) = a(i) * b(i);       
end

This gives:

ab = 2
     2
     9
     20
     20

This is fine, and it produces the correct answer, but it seems slightly inefficient; I presume there must be a syntactical way of doing this without the ‘for’ loop?

Answer 1

Try

a.*b

notice the . before the * which tells Matlab to do the multiplication element by element.