In MATLAB, classes can define Constant
properties, but not “static”
properties in the sense of other
languages like C++. There were beta
releases that experimented with
“Static” properties and the
undocumented attribute remains from
then. However, the Static attribute is
undocumented, should not be used, and
will likely be removed in a future
MATLAB release. R2008a implements it
as a synonym for Constant and provides
no additional functionality beyond
the documented behavior of Constant
properties.
Constant properties may not be changed
from the initial value specified in
the property declaration. There are a
couple of reasons why MATLAB works
the way it does. First, MATLAB has
longstanding rules that variables
always take precedent over the names
of functions and classes and that
assignment statements introduce a
variable if one doesn’t already exist.
Thus, any expression of the form “A.B
= C” will introduce a new variable A that is a struct array containing a
field B whose value is C. If “A.B = C”
could refer to a static property of
class A, then class A would take
precedent over variable A and this
would be a very significant
incompatibility with prior releases
of MATLAB. It would mean that an
m-file containing the assignment
statement “A.B = C” could have its
meaning changed by the introduction
of a class named A somewhere on the
MATLAB path. MATLAB programmers have
always been able to rely on assignment
statements introducing variables that
shadow any other use of the same name.
Second, we have observed that static data is rarely used in other classes except as private data within the class or as public constants. For example, a survey of several Java class libraries found that all public static fields were also final. In MATLAB, Constant properties can be used like “public final static” fields in Java. For data internal to a class, MATLAB already has persistent variables that can be created inside of private or protected methods or local functions privately used by a class. There are also good reasons to avoid static data in MATLAB where possible. If a class has static data, it can be difficult to use the same class in multiple applications because the static data can be a source of conflicts among applications. In some other languages, this is less of an issue because different applications are separately compiled into executables running in different processes with different copies of class static data. In MATLAB, frequently many different applications may be running in the same process and environment with a single copy of each class.