disp command

To help me learn the reactions of photosynthesis, specifically the mass balance between the various inputs and outputs, I'm writing a Matlab program that will run it for tMax time steps. So far I'm only through the light reactions, and of course I'm not doing this in any sort of complicated way. I've got an idea for it that I want to test, and if it's okay I might do it as my class project. 

In any case, today's short and handy MatLab tip comes from this... many people probably know this already, but there's a way to get your command prompt to print helpful messages. why do this? because long simulations aren't super fun to watch (in fact, you don't see anything).

So it's pretty easy
in fact, you don't need anything special to do it

it's just
disp('whatever you want to say!')

for example:

at the bottom is my script, which counts a bunch of stuff, and also stores it in matrices about where it is right now in the chloroplast... err, well, at the moment it's all still in the grana. Anyway, you see the disp command telling me that the light reactions are complete! At the top is the command window, where we also see that the light reactions are complete.

after I finish this I may post the script, it's of course hard to keep track of some of this stuff, and I'm sure I've made a minute error I haven't seen yet.