assign

  assign - make a list of assignments (matlab 5 or higher)

    ASSIGN('VAR1', VAL1, 'VAR2', VAL2, ...) makes the assignments 
    VAR1 = VAL1; VAR2 = VAL2; ... in the caller's workspace.

    This is most useful when passing in an option list to a
    function.  Thus in the function which starts:
        function foo(x,y,varargin)
        z = 0;
        assign(varargin{:});
    the variable z can be given a non-default value by calling the
    function like so: foo(x,y,'z',4);

        If the input is a single structure, then the structure is converted
        to a set of NAME/VALUE pairs and interpreted as 'VAR1', VAL1, etc,
        where VAR1 is the first field name of the input, VAL1 is the value of the field name,
        etc.