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I was gonna write something about how matlab isn't really that bad. And then I thought about how it's impossible to do anything with strings, y(0)=1; gives an error, variables from inside a function aren't stored in the workspace even if they are called from the workspace (among other stupid crap with functions), and God help your soul if you ever type the word "classdef" into an m-file. It's a good thing some of the built in functions are really powerful.

This is true. The most abhorrent fact is that [the version I used some six years ago] it would parse line by line while executing. So you would only get errors if the line actually got executed. The whole idea of line-based syntaxes is dubious in my view, but this makes it even worse.

MATLAB is a language? ;-)