What is your favourite MATLAB/Octave programming trick? [closed]

Answer 1

In order to be able to quickly test a function, I use nargin like so:

function result = multiply(a, b)
if nargin == 0 %no inputs provided, run using defaults for a and b
    clc;
    disp('RUNNING IN TEST MODE')
    a = 1;
    b = 2;
end

result = a*b;

Later on, I add a unit test script to test the function for different input conditions.