Distinction between a/b versions of Matlab?

So I am relatively new to Matlab and was wondering what the distinction is between the a and b versions of Matlab in the past few years? Are the "b" versions incremental updates? Or the same software with additional features? What about the latest releases 2010a and 2010b?

Thanks!

1 Answer

MathWorks has been putting out two releases of MATLAB per year for the past few years. The first one early in the year is a and the second one later on is b. The b release is a new version of MATLAB, not an incremental update.

They started this versioning scheme in 2006 and still maintain a numerical version number in the background. Here's a release history.