Different ways of specifying arguments in build-in Matlab commands

Hi,

I have got a quick questions, it probably a really stupid one but I just can't grasp my head around it... In Matlab it seems that it is possible to call a build-in matlab command with arguments in two different ways. The first one is just by sepcifiying the arguments in the functions

          scatter(x,y,sz,'d')

The second method is by using strings to kind of 'announce' to the function that the necessary arguments are coming

scatter(x,y,sz,'MarkerEdgeColor',[0 .5 .5],...
              'MarkerFaceColor',[0 .7 .7],...
              'LineWidth',1.5)

Why is it not possible to just do

   scatter(x,y,sz,[0 .5 .5],[0 .7 .7],1.5)      

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Because

scatter(x, y, sz, 'LineWidth', 1.5, 'MarkerFaceColor', [0 .7 .7], 'Parent', gca, 'MarkerEdgeColor',[0 .5 .5])

is also valid. Name/Value pairs can occur in any order, and are (often) optional, so scatter would have no way of knowing that

scatter(x,y,sz,[0 .5 .5],[0 .7 .7],1.5) 

was not intended to mean

scatter(x, y, sz, 'MarkerFaceColor', [0 0.5 0.5], 'MarkeEdgeColor', [0 0.7 0.7], 'Parent', 1.5)

[s z]

Makes sense, Thanks!

[s z]

I've got a follow up questions - How do I get the properties (for example MarkerFaceColor, LineWidth etc. from an object. For example I want to know which methods the class bar() has.

properties bar 
properties(bar)

These do not work... So I wanna do something like

properties plot

which then outputs

'LindWidth'
'Color'
'Marker'
'MarkerFaceColor'

etc..

[Stephen23]

obj = plot(...)
get(obj)

or from your installed documentation, or (for the current version) the online documentation. The object properties page is linked to from the function that creates it, e.g. plot documentation has a link to this:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.graphics.chart.primitive.line-properties.html

Note that plot does not have any properties: it is a function which generates a line object: line objects have properties.

[s z]

Thank you!

[Walter Roberson]

properties matlab.graphics.chart.primitive.Line
properties matlab.graphics.chart.primitive.Bar
bp = ?matlab.graphics.chart.primitive.Bar;
sortrows(char({bp.PropertyList.Name}))
sortrows(char({bp.PropertyList([bp.PropertyList.Hidden]).Name}))