This is a question about operator precedence, and we can find the rules here:
In there, we see that colon operator is quite low on the scale. So it gets evaluated LAST. That means we can view this expression
as the same as
Whew! I got lucky, and I was correct. MATLAB adds 10+1=11, as the lower limit for colon. The upper limit is 5*3=15.
In the second case, we know that : has the lowest order on that scale. So it will evaluate 5*3 as the upper limit for colon. But how about that 10? The 10 falls outside the parens. And parens is at the very top of the list. So what is inside the parens is evaluated before we add 10 to that result. So this expression generates the list 1:15. Then it adds 10 to every element in the list. So I expect to see the list 10:25 here.
10+(1:5*3)
ans =
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Again, it works.
