Say you declare a native array in C like you did, and you screw up and you write to the n+1st element of it. You just lost, badly -- now maybe you clobbered the loop variable and you'll sometimes not stop even though other times seem to work fine. To avoid that, you need to define a vector type, a bunch of functions on that type, and then you are stuck using the type and its functions That takes a lot of verbiage.

Also, I don't think you mean higher-order function the way I usually mean it, but I can't quite figure out what you mean. Solving Ax=b is written "A \ b" (as in, "divide" A by b, but with a backslash because it's not really division). Maybe matrix multiply would have been a better example, but I forget what the matlab operator is for that.