Unexpected behavior of mean function

I did the following:

X = [1;2;3;4;5];

mean X %I know, I forgot the parens - so I expected an error

%Here's what I got

ans = 88 % The ASCII code for 'X'

%Can anyone tell me why I got this answer?

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

"Can anyone tell me why I got this answer?"

You called the command syntax of mean:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/command-vs-function-syntax.html

As that documentation explains, these two are equivalent:

mean X
mean('X')

Although it can be convenient at the command line, I strongly recommend avoiding the command syntax in code. The command syntax is a momento of MATLAB's venerable age, from the dark-ages when programming languages commonly did such things...