Many people use Octave https://octave.org/ which is compatible (generally) with Matlab, supports this simple syntax, and is open source software. Indeed, I've taken at least one class where the instructor asked people use Octave for these kinds of calculations.

Yep -- Octave was very helpful for me in school.

Octave is not particularly fast.

RunMat is very fast (orders of magnitude -- see benchmarks).