Is it possible to disable or get warnings when using .* on mismatched vectors?

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I've finally moved up from 2014b and I see there is a new feature(s) that lets you do math operations that would have previously resulted in errors. For example, you can now use .* on vectors of different shapes. I can see how this could be handy sometimes, but in practice, I lose track of whether a vector is a row or column and instead of getting an error, MATLAB makes a big matrix and moves on. In bad cases, the math to follow is also valid resulting in weird answers. Is there a way to at least have this give out a warning?

Accepted Answer

Jan
Jan on 13 Dec 2017
Edited: Jan on 13 Dec 2017
No. Modern Matlab versions use "auto-expanding" e.g. for the elementwise multiplication .* . There is no way to produce a warning for this new standard behavior.
This has been discussed repeatedly and emotionally, because it has some advantages, but is an evil break with backward compatibility.
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Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 13 Dec 2017
I know that I for one would like to be able to disable it during my test / debugging cycles.
For example it is not uncommon for me to grab existing software to try to assist someone with it -- software I did not write. That software sometimes has bugs in row vs column use. If I just go ahead and run it, then implicit expansion can end up silently giving me strange results, which I might not be able to easily distinguish from the other bugs in the code.

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