Getting Started

Numbers

MATLAB uses conventional decimal notation, with an optional decimal point and leading plus or minus sign, for numbers. Scientific notation uses the letter e to specify a power-of-ten scale factor. Imaginary numbers use either i or j as a suffix. Some examples of legal numbers are

• 3              -99            0.0001
  9.6397238      1.60210e-20    6.02252e23
  1i             -3.14159j      3e5i
  

All numbers are stored internally using the long format specified by the IEEE floating-point standard. Floating-point numbers have a finite precision of roughly 16 significant decimal digits and a finite range of roughly 10^-308 to 10⁺³⁰⁸.

Expressions

Operators