Re: Matlab -- Venting, Plus Miscellaneous Questions

Steven O:

It seems to me you should complain to the instructor who told
the class to use Matlab. He/she obviously does not have a problem
with asking you to learn a significant number of commands.

You, on the other hand, want to be able to do your numerical
mathematics on something like an IPod.

Discussing your view with your instructor, instead of venting here, might
have produced something more valuable to you, your class, and your
instructor.

I personally find the interaction between the symbolic and "other"
parts of Mathlab to be unnecessarily clumsy. I think I've informed
Steven Lord about them; I think that deep in your intemperate
message you have hit on one or two such points. I don't expect
these to change as long as Matlab takes the view that all of
mathematics is a specialization of a matrix, rather than all of
mathematics is a specialization of a symbolic expression.

This makes it illegal to do this( at least in the last Matlab I tried)

sym(x)+1 --- because 1 is a 1X1 matrix, and sym(x) is a symbolic x
and they are incompatible.

You must do
sym(x)+sym(1)

The (to me) trivial solution in Matlab's overloaded object-oriented
command language is to allow for + operating on <symbol,other> to
convert other -->symbolic expression, and then add. For some reason
this is not allowed. Similarly, flags that might make sense in the
symbolic part and the numeric part do not, apparently, communicate.

Whether these are glitches in implementation or (un?)thoughtful design
decisions
is hard to tell.


RJF


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