The elements in the row are separated by spaces, while the rows are separated by a semi-colon. With the above syntax, two things will happen. In the case of large arrays, the last thing you need is to see the numbers which make up a. To execute the same assignment without displaying a, just add a semicolon at the end before hitting return. You can always check the content of your workspace. who will give a concise list of the variables, while whos will also provide information about those variables' sizes, sparsity, type, number of elements, etc.
Matrices can be elements of larger matrices.
For example, say we have the above variable a in our workspace. You can clear all the workspace and start from scratch, or clear a given variable, leaving other ones intact, using clear varname1 . You can save your workspace or parts of it. The data may be retrieved with load . Omitting the filename causes save to use the default filename matlab.mat.