Map function in MATLAB?

Question

I\'m a little surprised that MATLAB doesn\'t have a Map function, so I hacked one together myself since it\'s something I can\'t live without. Is there a better version out

Answer 1

If matlab does not have a built in map function, it could be because of efficiency considerations. In your implementation you are using a loop to iterate over the elements of the list, which is generally frowned upon in the matlab world. Most built-in matlab functions are "vectorized", i. e. it is more efficient to call a function on an entire array, than to iterate over it yourself and call the function for each element.

In other words, this

a = 1:10;
a.^2

is much faster than this

a = 1:10;
map(@(x)x^2, a)

assuming your definition of map.