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Spy Easter egg

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

For the 2009 Easter holiday, I thought I’d post a Matlab Easter egg, which I found on http://www.eeggs.com/items/47352.html: spy is a built-in stock Matlab function for visualizing sparse matrices. If you run spy with no input arguments, it uses an undocumented default built-in sparse matrix that generates one of the spies in the famous Spy vs. Spy comics series:

spy;

Matlab spy Easter egg

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Categories: Low risk of breaking in future versions, Stock Matlab function, Undocumented feature

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 11:24 am PST
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3 Responses to “Spy Easter egg”

  1. Naor Naor says:
    April 12, 2009 at 3:46 pm

    ’spy’ with no arguments was one of the first MATLAB commands I learned :)
    another one was ‘why’ with no arguments, maybe you consider that an Easter egg as well…

  2. Yair Altman Yair Altman says:
    April 12, 2009 at 11:08 pm

    @Naor – the difference is that why with no args is documented, so it’s fun but not a real Easter egg.
    Spy with no args is not documented.

  3. Image Easter egg | Undocumented Matlab Image Easter egg | Undocumented Matlab says:
    April 6, 2010 at 10:28 am

    [...] Last year I presented the Matlab Spy Easter egg for the 2009 Easter holiday. This year, slightly late, I present another Easter egg [...]

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