Spy Easter egg

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

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3 Responses to Spy Easter egg

  1. Naor says:

    ‘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…

    • Yair Altman says:

      @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.

  2. Pingback: Image Easter egg | Undocumented Matlab

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<pre lang="matlab">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>