Taking values out of a vector

What is the meaning of the following statement?

Where column is a variable with a size of N

column = % some set of values
N = size(column)
column([1 N(1):-1:2])

In general when we use a paranthese infront of the variable name, we are taking the values of the positions in the vector

Using the syntax of

:

we get all the values corresponding to the appropriate row/column,

But what happens when you input an array as shown above in the same parentheses.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

"What is the meaning of the following statement?"

It really is just basic MATLAB operations.

1- The square brackets and the colon operator simply define a vector of these values:

[1,N(1),N(1)-1,N(1)-2,...,4,3,2]

2- that vector of values is used as a index into column.

Assuming that column is a vector, the effect is to access the elements (2:end) of column in reverse order, with the first element still in the first position. It would probably be simpler to use end:

column([1,end:-1:2])