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MATLAB is well-known for being column-major. Consequently, manipulating entries of an array that are in the same column is faster than manipulating entries that are on the same row.
In that case, why do so many built-in functions, such as linspace and logspace, output row vectors rather than column vectors? This seems to me like a de-optimization...
What, if any, is the rationale behind this design decision?
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Programming languages and environments typically assume a single array layout for all data. MATLAB® and Fortran use column-major layout by default, whereas C and C++ use row-major layout.
A column vector is an nx1 matrix because it always has 1 column and some number of rows. A row vector is a 1xn matrix, as it has 1 row and some number of columns. This is the major difference between a column and a row vector.
You can convert a row vector into a column vector (and vice versa) using the transpose operator ' (an apostrophe). Try the following MATLAB commands: [1 3 5] is a row vector, but the ' converts it into a column vector before the result is stored in the variable x.
In one sense, you can say that a vector is simply an object with certain properties, and it is neither a row of numbers nor a column of numbers. But in practice, we often want to use a list of n numeric coordinates to describe an n-dimensional vector, and we call this list of coordinates a vector.
It is a good question. Here are some ideas...
My first thought was that in terms of performance and contiguous memory, it doesn't make a difference if it's a row or a column -- they are both contiguous in memory. For a multidimensional (>1D) array, it is correct that it is more efficient to index a whole column of the array (e.g. v(:,2)) rather than a row (e.g. v(2,:)) or other dimension because in the row (non-column) case it is not accessing elements that are contiguous in memory. However, for a row vector that is 1-by-N, the elements are contiguous because there is only one row, so it doesn't make a difference.
Second, it is simply easier to display row vectors in the Command Window, especially since it wraps the rows of long arrays. With a long column vector, you will be forced to scroll for much shorter arrays.
More thoughts...
Perhaps row vector output from linspace and logspace is just to be consistent with the fact that colon (essentially a tool for creating linearly spaced elements) makes a row:
>> 0:2:16
ans =
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
The choice was made at the beginning of time and that was that (maybe?).
Also, the convention for loop variables could be important. A row is necessary to define multiple iterations:
>> for k=1:5, k, end
k =
1
k =
2
k =
3
k =
4
k =
5
A column will be a single iteration with a non-scalar loop variable:
>> for k=(1:5)', k, end
k =
1
2
3
4
5
And maybe the outputs of linspace and logspace are commonly looped over. Maybe? :)
But, why loop over a row vector anyway? Well, as I say in my comments, it's not that a row vector is used for loops, it's that it loops through the columns of the loop expression. Meaning, with for v=M where M is a 2-by-3 matrix, there are 3 iterations, where v is a 2 element column vector in each iteration. This is actually a good design if you consider that this involves slicing the loop expression into columns (i.e. chunks of contiguous memory!).
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