Repmat for BIDMat?

[ago109]

Probably a simple question, but is there a repmat() (as in Matlab) like function for BIDMat? In essence, let's say I have a column-major vector (or Mat), how would I efficiently create a matrix of the same number of rows as the column-vector but a specified number of columns?

I was wondering if BIDMat offered some clever (speedy) alternatives to simply doing the following:
var col_vec = rand(4,1)
var matrix = ones(4,4) *@ col_vec //since elementwise products in BIDMat can also multiply matrices by column vectors (etc.)