clc;
clear;
more off;

function [retval] = GetSuffix (number)
  ordinalIndicators = cellstr({"st"; "nd"; "rd"; "th"});
  numAsString = num2str(number);

  last2Digits = mod(number, 100);
  if(last2Digits >= 11 && last2Digits <= 13)
    suffix = ordinalIndicators{4};
    else
     modulo = mod(number, 10);
   if(modulo >= 1 && modulo <=3)
      suffix = ordinalIndicators{modulo};
    else
      suffix = ordinalIndicators{4};
    endif
  endif
  retval = strcat(numAsString, suffix);
endfunction


a = rand(4, 8); # creates the 4x8 matrix with random numbers between 0 (inclusive) and 1 (exclusive)

comparisonStrings = cellstr({" and is not bigger than 0.5."; " and is bigger than 0.5."});

disp(a);

# these 2 loops will go through the matrix

[rowCount, columnCount] = size(a);

#disp(rowCount);
#disp(columnCount);

for row = 1:1:rowCount
  for column = 1:1:columnCount
    currentRowString = GetSuffix(row); # get a string based on the given number, for example 1 becomes "1st" and 4 becomes "4th"
    currentColumnString = GetSuffix(column); # same as above

    currentValue = a(row, column); # the current value of the element we want to check
    stringValue = currentValue > 0.5; # the comparison of the value to 0.5
    stringValue++; # we add 1 here because octave arrays start at 1 and not at 0 so we have to add 1 for accessing the strings

    # this is a gigantic method call which pretty much concatenates all the strings together to the print output you want
    # i haven't found a better/more elegant way to concatenate strings in octave but this will do the job
    # note here that "cstrcat" will not ignore whitespaces for formatting while "strcat" does
    stringResult = cstrcat("The value in the ", currentRowString, " row and the ", currentColumnString, " column is ", num2str(currentValue), comparisonStrings{stringValue});
    disp(stringResult); # prints out the string for each value in the matrix

  endfor
endfor