

Here is a short tutorial to create combination and permutation functions for FreeMat, from the FreeMat project home page at. In order to create functions, you can use Notepad (Windows) or vi or gedit (Linux). FreeMat also comes with a built-in editor for this purpose (see fig 1). When the editor window opens up after typing ‘edit,’ enter the following combination function:įunction return_value=comb(n,r) In FreeMat, a function is a script that starts with word ‘function’ and uses the following syntax:įunction return_value = To open the FreeMat editor, first run FreeMat and then, from the command line, type in the word ‘edit’ (without the quotes). To make it a function that FreeMat can use, store the file in a folder that is part of the FreeMat path. Select Tools→Path Tool and check that the directory where the function will be stored is part of the path. To save the function, either select File→ Save or click ‘Save’ icon. When you save the file, put a ‘.m’ extension on it. This lets FreeMat know that it is a usable script.
#Freemat defining functions how to
How to get started Introduction to FreeMat 6.
#Freemat defining functions software
The code for it is as follows:įunction return_value=perm(n,r) The permutation function is similar to the combination function. What is FreeMat FreeMat is an open source software package that provides all the basic functions of MATLAB It lacks the sophisticated toolboxes provided by the MATLAB, but it works perfectly if you use basic functions Introduction to FreeMat 5. The most common errors when trying to use functions is: Let us do a couple of simple tests on your new functions: Just as we did earlier, save the file to a directory within the working path. This means that FreeMat cannot find the function. Double-check that you typed the function name correctly. We plan to have functional JIT compiler in Freemat 4.Also check that the directory where the files are stored is in the path set by the path tool (Tools→Path Tool). However, you can generate and optimize code on the fly and get near optimal performance (the only thing you can't do with JIT code is interprocedural optimizations). It is not perfect - the library is really huge and quite hard to compile and use. Java JIT seemed better suited for Java language. Samit and I looked at three jit compilers: Java JIT, Mono JIT, and LLVM.

In most cases variables have well defined type at runtime. However, code like the snippet above is rare. However, such implementation results in code that is not much faster than interpreted code. One can imagine using an object to represent variables (the object would carry a type and pointer to memory where data is stored) and assignement operator which would assign both value and type. What's the type of a? Compiler has to know the variable size and type to emit correct code. The main reason is that the variable types are determined at runtime. This is very tricky for dynamic languages such as Matlab (also Python, Perl, etc.

The goal for using JIT (just-in-time compilation) is to speed up interpreted code by compiling it in run time. However, this is 21st century and we have better ways. The old view - almost always using clever indexing one can avoid loops.

Matrix or index operations on the other hand turn into internal function calls and are fast. The main reason is that I got conditioned (like the generations of matlab users) that loops are really slow because they have to be interpreted. I started using Matlab circa version 4 and I still cringe every time I have to write a loop in Matlab.
