Matlab: Easy way of getting the standard basis vectors?

Question

It seems like this should be easy, but I'm no expert and google isn't helping.

I would like an elegant way in Matlab of producing the standard ordered basis vectors for an n-dimensional space. For example, behaviour similar to the following:

>> [e1, e2] = SOB(2);
>> e1

  e1 =    1     0

>> e2

  e2 =    0     1

I'm hoping for a 1-liner and don't really want to write a function for something so simple.

Thanks

Answer 1

Why not

A = eye(N); 

then A(:,i) is your i-th basis vector