NSCS 344, Week 8: Concepts

Table of Contents

Function handles are a way of turning functions into variables. For example, let's turn the "mean" function into a function handle.

fHandle = @(x) mean(x)
fHandle = function_handle with value:
    @(x)mean(x)

Now we can get the mean of a vector by typing

fHandle([1 2 3])
ans = 2

We can also assign the handle to another variable name like this

H = fHandle;

Then

H([1 2 3])
ans = 2

We can also have more than one input to a function handle like this

fHandle = @(x, y) mean(x, y)
fHandle = function_handle with value:
    @(x,y)mean(x,y)

where the second input tells us the dimension to take the mean over

fHandle([1 2 3], 1)
ans = 1×3
     1     2     3
fHandle([1 2 3], 2)
ans = 2