Perhaps how much of MATLAB is influenced by Pascal,etc, but it is particularly clumsy and inelegant, as if it stuck in the 80's, not to mention proprietary, I wait for the day when we can move out of it.
Have you checked out Octave? They target (bug-for-bug?) compatibility with MATLAB, so most pure MATLAB code will port over with no edits necessary. It's also a GNU project
Well then all complaints about the MATLAB language also apply to Octave.