What does sc in imagesc stand for?

Pretty much the title question. Thank you.

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

scaled colors

doc imagesc

[Walter Roberson]

I thought it was just "scaled", going along with soundsc() which certainly is not "scaled colors"

[the cyclist]

solid point

[David Katz]

how do we know for sure? just becasue the doc uses that phrase in the summary? Also, how can I see the code for imagesc?

[Walter Roberson]

how do we know for sure?

You could write to Mathworks Human Resources and ask them to track down the person who named the function, and contact that person and ask exactly the reason it was named the way it was. If that person is still alive, and is still able to respond, and still remembers...

[Walter Roberson]

I was watching a video not long ago that said that one of the grammatical structures in current use in English used to use a different phrasing, but that the word involved started with ð (eth) and when English mostly merged þ (thorn) and ð (eth) both into the diathong th that the revised spelling turned it into a different word. So sometimes when you ask "why" something is the way it is, you have to go back hundreds of years and even then do not really get a good answer to exactly "why" something happened historically. Two tribes met and commercial words from the more far-ranging traders were adopted but the pronunciation was influenced by the tribe with the larger population ?

[David Katz]

That you for this answer Walter. I am wiser for having read this.

[DGM]

Does it really matter whether those two letters mean "scaled" or "scaled color" or "scaled cdata"?

Or is it more important what all three of those names suggest? All three describe the behavior of the function -- specifically how it differs from the behavior of image(). Imagesc() is basically a simple wrapper for image() which adds the convenience of setting the 'CDataMapping' property to 'scaled'. It offers a few related conveniences, but that's the main one that most people would use when calling it with no extra arguments. Doing this:

imagesc(myimage)

is (basically) the same as

image(myimage,'cdatamapping','scaled') % default is 'direct'

I don't know if that was even part of the curiosity, but I'll just throw that out there anyway.

I will add one thought. Imagesc() really looks like the type of thing you'd write after you found yourself doing something simple way too often. So if you're going to write a simple convenience tool, what's the likelihood the name you'd use is in some way an abbreviated reference to the options you want to avoid typing again?

I could be wrong. I don't know what the earliest versions of these two functions looked like.

[Walter Roberson]

@David Katz

By the way,

edit imagesc

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

Well I always thought it meant scaled since it works for gray scale and I don't use the word "color" for gray levels. And it is consistent with the sc in soundsc() vs sound() function where it means scaled (since sounds don't have visible colors).

However the help says this:

imagesc

Display image with scaled colors

imagesc(C) displays the data in array C as an image that uses the full range of colors in the colormap. Each element of C specifies the color for one pixel of the image.

So I guess it's somewhat ambiguous whether the c is from "scaled", or if it's from "colors".