I am looking for some style/best practice advice. I often find myself writing scripts which need many (several tens of) parameters to be defined at the beginning. Then these parameters are used by many functions within the script. A minimum, simplified example might look something like the following:
params.var1 = 1;
params.var2 = 10;
params.var3 = 100;
params.var4 = 1e3;
result1 = my_func1(params);
result2 = my_func2(params);
Now, I don't want to pass many inputs into every function, so am reluctant to do something like result1 = my_func1(var1,var2,var3,var4,...). Therefore, I always find myself making each variable a field of a structure (e.g. params), and then passing this structure alone into each function, as above. The structure is not modified by the functions, only the parameters are used for further calculations.
One of the functions might look like this then:
function result = my_func1(params)
var1 = params.var1;
var2 = params.var2;
var3 = params.var3;
var4 = params.var4;
result = var1.^2 + var2.^2 -var3.^3 + var4;
end
Now, because I don't want to refer to each variable within the function as params.var1, etc. (in the interest of keeping the expression for result as clear as possible), I first do all this unpacking at the beginning using var1 = params.var1.
I suppose the best thing to be doing in situations like this might be to use classes (because I have some data and also want to perform functions on that data). Are there any better ways for me to be doing this kind of thing without moving fully to object-oriented code?
I would simply leave the unpacking out. Call the struct params something shorter inside the function, to keep clutter to a minimum:
function result = my_func1(p)
result = p.var1.^2 + p.var2.^2 - p.var3.^3 + p.var4;
end
I would keep calling it params elsewhere, so you don’t have to deal with cryptic names.