What is happening in this while loop

this is a peice of code written in matlab.

while(flag==1)
flag=0; 
disp('end of loop'); 
end

surprisingly, this does not display the string and if i remove disp statement and figure1 window appears. can anyone explain why?

Answer 1

[Andreas Justin]

flag = true
while flag
  flag=0;
  disp('end of loop'); 
end

see: doc flag

[Image Analyst]

I bet a lot of people don't know flag is the name of a built-in function - I didn't. So it's best to use some other name instead of flag, like keepLooping, or keepGoing, or something. And your point of initializing flag prior to entering the loop is really the key issue here (because you could actually overwrite the flag function with your own variable of the same name if you wanted to, though it's not advised).