Punctuation¶

Extended documentation for mathematical symbols & functions is here.

symbol meaning

@m invoke macro m; followed by space-separated expressions

! prefix “not” operator

a!( ) at the end of a function name, ! indicates that a function modifies its argument(s)

# begin single line comment

#= begin multi-line comment (these are nestable)

=# end multi-line comment

$ xor operator, string and expression interpolation

% remainder operator

^ exponent operator

& bitwise and

* multiply, or matrix multiply

() the empty tuple

~ bitwise not operator

\ backslash operator

' complex transpose operator A^H

a[] array indexing

[,] vertical concatenation

[;] also vertical concatenation

[ ] with space-separated expressions, horizontal concatenation

T{ } parametric type instantiation

{ } construct a cell array

; statement separator

, separate function arguments or tuple components

? 3-argument conditional operator (conditional ? if_true : if_false)

"" delimit string literals

'' delimit character literals

`` delimit external process (command) specifications

... splice arguments into a function call or declare a varargs function or type

. access named fields in objects or names inside modules, also prefixes elementwise operators

a:b range a, a+1, a+2, ..., b

a:s:b range a, a+s, a+2s, ..., b

: index an entire dimension (1:end)

:: type annotation, depending on context

:( ) quoted expression

:a symbol a