10>6>4

I am reviewing for a test and one of the questions is "what would be the outcome of 10>6>4?" I thought it would be logical: 1 because all the statements are true, but when I put it into MATLAB it returned logical: 0 for any number I used. Can anyone explain this?

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

"Can anyone explain this?"

MATLAB has a binary operator gt, e.g. A>B, but it does not have a ternary operator A>B>C. So your example

10>6>4

is exactly equivalent to this:

(10>6)>4

The part in the parentheses will only ever return the values 0 (false) or 1 (true), so the second comparison will always return false (unless you reduce the value 4 to 0 or less).

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/operator-precedence.html

Answer 2

[Steven Lord]

Type the following into the MATLAB Editor:

y = 10>6>4;

The number 6 is underlined in orange. Hover over the number 6 to see what the Code Analyzer message says. The details explain how MATLAB interprets that statement and what you should use instead.