Matlab's syntax for matrices actually derives from Fortran. There's a lot of flexibility in Fortran's array features for

• multidimensional arrays
• arrays of indeterminate and flexible length
• vectorized operations on arrays without explicitly writing loops.

Because Fortran does not have a pointer in the sense of C, the Fortran compiler is free to make several optimization that a C compiler can't. Compiled Fortran is often faster than C code that does the same thing.