Someone (maybe, Jerzy Karczmarczuk) wrote recently
> Do you know what makes Maple so attractive for newbies, for teachers,
> etc? One of the reasons is simply scandalous, awful, unbelievably
> silly : the lack of distinction between a symbolic indeterminate,
> and the program variable. You write ... f(x) ... and if x has not
> been previously assigned, you get 'x'. Computer algebra packages are
> - from the programming discipline perspective - monsters. You won't
> try to do things like that, in Haskell, ML, or anything reasonable.
Is there any problem?
Introduce the program variables x,y... and bound them to the symbolic
indeterminates.
For example, in DoCon program, it is arranged about like this:
let { s = cToPol ["x","y"] 1; [x,y] = varPs s }
in
x^2*(x - x*y) ...
Here cToPol, varPs are the "standard" functions.
cToPol creates a sample polynomial s in needed indeterminates.
varPs f extracts indeterminates from f and converts them to the
domain of f.
`let' describes the algebraic domain - once.
Hence, in many computations after `in', x,y denote what is needed.
Maybe, Maple is popular for other reason? Maybe, due to the rich
library of efficient algorithms? Integration, numeric methods, and
so on. I suppose this, i do not know.
------------------
Sergey Mechveliani
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
