Question

So I’m completely new to MATLAB and I’m trying to understand colon notation within mathematical operations. So, in this book I found this statement:

w(1:5)=j(1:5) + k(1:5);

I do not understand what it really does. I know that w(1:5) is pretty much iterating through the w array from index 1 through 5, but in the statement above, shouldn’t all indexes of w be equal to j(5) + k(5) in the end? Or am I completely wrong on how this works? It’d be awesome if someone posted the equivalent in Java to that up there. Thanks in advance 🙂

Answer 1

I am pretty sure this means

“The first 5 elements of w shall be the first 5 elements of j + the first 5 elements of k” (I am not sure if matlab arrays start with 0 or 1 though)

So:

w1 = j1+k1
w2 = j2+k2
w3 = j3+k3
w4 = j4+k4
w5 = j5+k5

Think “Vector addition” here.