simple integrals
- To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
- Subject: simple integrals
- From: withoff
- Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 11:40:07 CDT
Regarding Heino Falcke's comment about the slowness of certain simple integrals, integrals like Integrate[ c z^-(1/2), dz] can and should be made faster, even if c is very complicated. In general, symbolic functions like Solve and Integrate need to more about symbolic expressions than just whether or not they are constant, and do a correspondingly large amount of processing for large constants. There is a tradeoff between general algorithms that can handle constants no matter where they appear, and fast special case code to handle situations in the constants can be handled very crudely (knowing nothing more than that they are constant). Most common special cases like Integrate[ c z^-(1/2), dz] have already been added, but apparently this one was forgotten.