Dealing with xyz coordinates in linear algebra for computer graphics, there are predominant two styles when concatenating a list of many positions/vectors/matrices. The first groups common coordinates together. For example a list of mesh vertex coordinates may look like:
V = [x1
x2
...
xk
y1
y2
...
yk
z1
z2
...
zk];
The other style groups common objects together, listing all coordinates in a stream. For our vertex positions this would look like:
V = [x1
y1
z1
x2
y2
z2
...
xk
yk
zk];
In OpenGL and array language the first option has a data access stride of 1 if pulling x-coordinates and the second option has a stride of n. Of course if pulling position vectors then the first option has a stride of n and the second a stride of 1. Hence, the two styles really have appropriate use cases depending on data access patterns.
This gets a bit more complicated if we're not just storing a scalar in each row, but a n-vector.
In matlab, it's very easy to convert between one representation and the other. Suppose you have a k*m-by-n matrix A stored in the first format above. We can rearrange it to move all common objects together (forming a stack of k m-by-n matrices), with:
A = [1 2 3; ...
4 5 6; ...
7 8 9; ...
10 11 12; ...
13 14 15; ...
16 17 18; ...
19 20 21; ...
22 23 24];
n = 3;
B = reshape(permute(reshape(A,[],2,n),[3 2 1]),n,[])';
and the output is
B =
1 2 3
13 14 15
4 5 6
16 17 18
7 8 9
19 20 21
10 11 12
22 23 24
To convert back:
C = reshape(permute(reshape(B',n,2,[]),[3 2 1]),[],n);
and we get again:
C =
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
10 11 12
13 14 15
16 17 18
19 20 21
22 23 24