Question

In Matlab, the following statement gives a numeric output . .

>> 'abc' + 'def'

ans =

   197   199   201

In C++, the output of the following

std::string("abc") + std::string("def") 

…would give the arguably more useful…

abcdef

A little more exploration gives..

>> a = 'abc'

a =

abc

>> whos
  Name      Size            Bytes  Class    Attributes

  a         1x3                 6  char   

This suggests that my variable a is a char type. However, we know that this is not equivalent to a C type char, as it is an object that knows its size dimensions etc.

Therefore, my questions are:
What use would this numeric output be?

…leading to

Why would they design it to behave like that?

Answer 1

Because a string in Matlab is literally just an array of char type, so it’s equivalent to:

[97 98 99] + [100 101 102]

It is not set in stone that + means “concatenate”. If you want string concatenation in Matlab, you can always do:

['abc' 'def']