MATLAB Programming Course For Beginners

A: Governing principle: MATLAB arrays reallocate on growth, breaking time and memory bounds. Applied here: 10^7 elements at double precision already push memory; preallocation fixes size and avoids copy-on-write churn during the loop. The cell-array option traps people who know concatenation is expensive but forget each cell still carries overhead and the final concat spikes memory.

A: Governing principle: IEEE-754 arithmetic propagates NaN once generated. Applied here: a single divide-by-zero inside the loop contaminates all downstream results without stopping execution. The uninitialized-variable distractor catches engineers coming from C, where defaults are undefined, not NaN.

A: Governing principle: accumulation error scales with machine epsilon of the data type. Applied here: double precision has a smaller epsilon, so repeated small adds drift less than single. The integer-cast option traps people who know integers are exact but miss that scaling destroys the fractional resolution.

A: Governing principle: MATLAB is optimized for vectorized array operations. Applied here: direct array addition maps to optimized BLAS routines and is clearer. The sum-with-concatenation option catches people who know sum() well but misuse dimensions.