If statements

One of the most commonly used programming language constructs is the if-construct. With this construct it is possible to decide whether or not to execute certain program lines, based on a relational test of logical variables. The general form of this construct is:

if logical expression
    program lines
elseif logical expression
    program lines
else
    program lines
end

The elseif and else statements are optional, so they can also be omitted. A logical expression is either true or false. In MATLAB, the value 1 is given to a true expression, and the value 0 is given to a false expression. When evaluating logical expressions, we use relational and logical operators given in Table 6.1:

Table 6.1: Relational operators

Relational
<	lower than
<=	lower than or equal to
>	greater than
>=	greater than or equal to
==	equal to
~=	not equal to
Logical
&	and
|	or
~	not

Examples:

• 1 < 2 is true,
• 1 == 1 is true,
• 1 == 2 is false,
• 1 ~= 2 is true

Example 6.4: Write a MATLAB program that simulates the sign function. Use the MATLAB help to see what this function means.

% make a row with time steps
t = -10:0.1:10

% determine the number of time steps in array t with the command size
n = max(size(t))

% initialise the values of f at zero
f = zeros(1,n)

% determine the function values in a FOR loop
for k = 1:n
    if t(k) < 0
        f(k) = -1;
    elseif t(k) == 0
         f(k) = 0;
    elseif t(k) > 0
        f(k) = 1;
    end
end

% plot the function
plot(t,f)

Check that, due to the fact that we have initialised f at 0, this if-loop can be simplified.

Example 6.5: Using a for-loop and conditional tests to calculate the inner product of two vectors.

To this end, we write a new function m-file, i.e., we create our own MATLAB command to calculate the inner product. We call our new command inprod. To realise this, we write a new function m-file `inprod.m'. We will call the two vectors we want to multiply in this file $a$ and $b$ . We will call the output argument result.

function result = inprod(a,b)

% test whether the vectors a and b have the sam length
%(otherwise it is not possible to determine the inner product.)

[ra ca] = size(a); % the command size gives the size of the matrix a
                   % by assigning the number of rows of a to ra
                   % and the number of columns of a to ca
[rb cb] = size(b);

if ca~=1 % Note, that '~' represents 'not'
    error('first argument is not a vector')
end

if cb~=1
    error('second argument is not a vector')
end

if ra~=rb
    error('vectors cannot be multiplied: they do not have the same length')
end

% initialisation of result (a number)
result = 0;
for p = 1:ra
    result = result+a(p,1)*b(p,1);
end

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