title: Accessing variable by string name
body: <p>I need to load experimental data into <em>scicoslab</em>, a (pretty badly designed) <strike>clone</strike> fork of <em>scilab</em> which happens to support graphical modeling. The documentation on the web is pretty poor, but it's reasonably similar to <em>scilab</em> and <em>octave</em>.</p>
  
  <p>The data I need to process is contained into a certain number of text files: <code>Data_005</code>, <code>Data_010</code>, …, <code>Data_100</code>. Each of them can be loaded using the <em>-ascii</em> flag for the <code>loadmatfile</code> command.</p>
  
  <p>The problem comes from the fact that <code>loadmatfile("foo", "-ascii")</code> loads the file <code>foo.mat</code> into a variable named <code>foo</code>. In order to to cycle on the data files, I would need to do something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>for i = [5:5:100]
      name = sprintf("Data_%02d", i);
      loadmatfile(name, "-ascii");
      x = read_var_from_name(name);
      do_something(x);
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>where what I search for is a builtin <code>read_var_from_name</code> which would allow me to access the internal symbol table by string.</p>
  
  <p>Do you know if there exist a similar function?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>There's no way of overriding this behavior if your file is in <em>ascii</em> format;</li>
  <li>In this phase I could also use octave (no graphical modelling is involved), although it behaves in the same way.</li>
  </ol>