What is the advantage of linspace over the colon “:” operator?

Question

Is there some advantage of writing

t = linspace(0,20,21)

over

t = 0:1:20

?

I understand the fo

Answer 1

linspace is useful where you know the number of elements you want rather than the size of the "step" between them. So if I said make a vector with 360 elements between 0 and 2*pi as a contrived example it's either going to be

linspace(0, 2*pi, 360)

or if you just had the colon operator you would have to manually calculate the step size:

0:(2*pi - 0)/(360-1):2*pi

linspace is just more convenient

For a simple real world application, see this answer where linspace is helpful in creating a custom colour map