DEALCELL

Deals cell elements to variables (similar to DEAL)

DEALCELL Deals cell elements to variables
[A1,A2,A3,...] = DEALCELL(X) assigns elements of cell array X to output lists. It is the same as A1=X{1}, A2=X{2}, A3=X{3}, ..., AN=X{N}. There can be any number of variables (up to the total number of elements in X) on the left hand side. If there are fewer LHS variables than the total number of elements in X, then only the first N elements of X are assigned.

DEALCELL works similarly to DEAL, except that it is specialized for cell array inputs and that the cell array does not have to be passed in as comma-separated lists.

This is a very short code (0 lines), and for cell array dealing, it is faster than DEAL.

The code:
function varargout = dealcell(varargout)

Helpful error messages are sacrificed for efficiency. To enable better error-checking, uncomment the Error Checking section below.

Example: (speed comparison with DEAL)
sys={'hello'; 'yes'; 'no'; 'goodbye'};
tic; % DEALCELL
for id = 1:100000
[a1,b1,c1,d1] = dealcell(sys);
end
fprintf('\nDEALCELL: %1.3f sec (%d iterations)\n', toc, id);

tic; % DEAL
for id = 1:100000
[a2,b2,c2,d2] = deal(sys{:});
end
fprintf('DEAL : %1.3f sec (%d iterations)\n\n', toc, id);
isequal({a1,b1,c1,d1},{a2,b2,c2,d2})

See also DEAL, LISTS, PAREN.

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This is a simplification to DEAL, to be used with cell arrays specifically. Comments on its usefulness are welcome. Thanks.