Changing the Rules ... in Appearance Only

The paper develops a set of member functions in MATLAB that implement the tailoring in a way that allows objects to mimic structures. It takes advantage of a pair of standard, but relatively unknown, functions, subsref.m and subsasgn.m. The built-in versions operate on structures. Tailored versions, as long as MATLAB can find them, operate on objects. As tailored member functions, subsref.m and subsasgn.m are so critical to object-oriented programming that they share a place beside the constructor in the group of eight.