Strings and Cell Arrays

Strings

name = 'Ada';
greeting = ['Hello, ', name, '!'];
disp(greeting)
fprintf('Hello, %s! You are %d.\n', name, 30)

fprintf formats output with placeholders (%s for a string, %d for an integer, %f for a decimal) -- much more readable than building strings by concatenation for anything with numbers in it.

Cell arrays

A normal array needs every entry to be the same type/size; a cell array (curly braces) can hold anything, mixed:

c = {'Ada', 28, [1 2 3]};
disp(c{1})  % 'Ada' -- curly braces to get the actual content out

Why This Matters for Your Exams

Cell arrays show up whenever a problem's data isn't uniform -- a list of names alongside a list of scores of different lengths, for instance, which a normal matrix can't hold at all.