MATLAB Programming

2 Data Types
Numeric Types
Numeric data types in MATLAB include signed and unsigned integers, and
single- and double-precision floating-point numbers. By default, MATLAB
stores all numeric values as double-precision floating point. However,
you can choose to store any number, or array of numbers, as integers
or as single-precision. Integer and single-precision arrays offer more
memory-efficient storage than double-precision.
All numeric types support basic array operations, such as subscripting and
reshaping. All numeric types except for int64 and uint64 can be used in
mathematical operations.
This section covers the following topics:
• “Integers” on page 2-6
• “Floating-Point Numbers” on page 2-14
• “Complex Numbers” on page 2-24
• “Infinity and NaN” on page 2-25
• “Identifying Numeric Types” on page 2-27
• “Display Format for Numeric Values” on page 2-27
• “Function Summary” on page 2-29
Integers
MATLAB has four signed and four unsigned integer data types. Signed types
enable you to work with negative integers as well as positive, but cannot
represent as wide a range of numbers as the unsigned types because one bit
is used to designate a positive or negative sign for the number. Unsigned
types give you a wider range of numbers, but these numbers can only be
zero or positive.
This section covers:
• “Creating Integer Data” on page 2-7
• “Arithmetic Operations on Integer Data Types” on page 2-9
2-6