OVERVIEW

With sixteen chapters under your belt, you can now create sophisticated, robust MATLAB classes on your own. During the first few implementations, it is easy to stay motivated because there are many new twists and turns. After the first few, however, the repetitive syntax can quickly become monotonous and time-consuming. At some point, you need to shift back into a product focus but the implementation mechanics are too tedious to allow your attention to waver. Once you shift from How do I implement objects? back to How do I use objects to implement products? you are likely to find yourself wishing for some sort of class-generation tool. Standard, repetitive tasks like building the group-of-eight functions are ideally suited for automation. Of course, this did not happen by accident. Modularity along with a constant drive to isolate class-dependent code into a small subset of functions makes automation possible.

This chapter introduces an automated code-generation tool that simplifies group-of-eight development for MATLAB classes. Using the tool, you can define a collection of public and private member variables along with an associated collection of public and private member functions. The tool will use these to generate fully functional class code that follows the guidelines developed in the previous sixteen chapters. All of the various bells and whistles are included. The tool will even give you a head start on class tailoring by generating a function template for public functions and helpers. The template includes the function definition along with reasonably complete header...