Using Functions with the Vectors and Matrices:

As MATLAB is written to work with the vectors and matrices, the whole vector or matrix can be passed as an argument to the function. MATLAB will compute the function on every element, and return as a result the vector or matrix with similar dimensions as the original. For illustration, we could pass the vector below, vec, to the abs function in order to get the absolute value of each and every element.

>> vec = -3:4

vec =

-3    -2    -1    0    1    2    3    4

>> abs(vec)

ans =

 3    2    1    0    1    2    3    4

The original vector vec has 8 elements, and as the abs function is computed for every element, the resulting vector also has 8 elements.

This would also be the case for matrices:

>> mat = randint(2,3,[-5,5])

mat =

-5 -1  0

 3  5 -1

>> abs(mat)

ans =

5 1 0

3 5 1