How do I manipulate arrays more efficiently?

I am in the habit of using nested for loops to sort arrays. I suspect there are methods that are much simpler and don't require as much debugging.

The following is an example from a Cody problem. The function is to sort elements of vector a by their distance from number t. The name of the problem was "target sorting". Elements that are closest to t will be nearest the end of the vector. Elements that are farther from t will be nearest the beginning of the vector. Here is a link to the problem.

And here is my code:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%% Code %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

function b = targetSort(a,t)

b = [];

for( i=1 : numel(a) )

    shell = abs( t-a(i) )

    if( numel(b) == 0)
      b = [a(i)]

    else
      for( j=1: numel(b) )

        if( shell > (abs(t - b(1))) )
          b = [a(i) b]
          break
        end

        k = j+1
        if( j==numel(b) )
          b = [b a(i)]
        elseif( ...
                 and( ...
                      ( shell <= abs(t - b(j  )) ), ...
                      ( shell >= abs(t - b(k)) )  ...
                    )...
               )
          b = [b(1:j) a(i) b(k:end ) ]
          break

        end
      end
    end
  end     
end
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Answer 1

[CS Researcher]

How about this:

b = abs(a-t);
[~,l] = sort(b,'descend');
c = a(l);

Hope this helps!