MATLAB: Functional form of the colon (:) operator

Question

This is a post about "how to write neat, efficient, readable MATLAB code". I get the job done by doing work-arounds, but I would rather not do those.

Assume that a, b are two vectors of unknown orientation, and we want to compute something similar to the dot-product.

It might look something like this:

function y = myfunc(a,b)
//make sure that vectors are oriented the same way
y = a(:) .* b(:);

But what if I need to calculate y for elements 2:N? We might do something like this, but I think it clutters the code:

function y = myfunc(a,b)
a = a(2:end)
b = b(2:end)
y = a(:) .* b(:);

I am wishing for a functional form of the colon operator that might look something like this:

function y = myfunc(a,b)
y = colon(a(2:end)) .* colon(b(2:end));

Answer 1

function y = myfunc(a,b)
//make sure that vectors are oriented the same way
y = reshape(a(2:end),[],1) .* reshape(b(2:end),[],1);