Taylor Series as a for loop

I have my script written as

taylor_approx.m

x = -.5:.01:.5;      
n = 10;
for k = 0:n
1/(1-x) = ((1/(1-x)) + x.^k/factorial(k));
% Gives the approx value of e^x as a taylor series
end

but it gives me the parse error "=" may not be valid MatLab syntax.

My professor sent us this to run it:

close all; clear all;

% setup the independent variable
x = -.5:.01:.5;      
y = 1./(1-x);

% get the size of x
npts = numel(x);

% plot colors
colors = {'g','r','b','m','c'};

% plot the real function (sine)
plot(x,y,'k','LineWidth',2); hold on;

% calculate successively higher taylor series approximations 
% higher approximations of the Taylor series
for order=1:5
T = zeros(npts,1);  % zero out T
for i=1:numel(x);
    T(i) = taylor_approx(x(i),order); % user defined function 
end;
plot(x,T,char(colors(order)));
end;

legend('sinx','0th order','1st','2nd','3rd','4th')

[Jan]

Your professor sent code which contains clear all? This clears all breakpoints also. And everything, which impedes debugging is a bad idea, for a professional programmer and even more for a beginner. And a lot of problems in this forum could be solved by using the debugger locally.

The shown error message is not really helpful, because we have to guess, where it occurs. In addition it is not clear, what the question is.

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

What is this

1/(1-x) = ((1/(1-x)) + x.^k/factorial(k));

[Karolyn]

The original function was f(x) = 1/(1-x), so that's the taylor series approximation for it

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

the expression in the left of = should be a name of a variable. I think you should learn the basics of programming