Re: Re: trig expansion
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg9347] Re: [mg9323] Re: trig expansion
- From: seanross at worldnet.att.net
- Date: Sat, 1 Nov 1997 03:33:34 -0500
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Paul Abbott wrote: > > Murray Eisenberg wrote: > > > I find that really unpleasant to have to do! I expect to be able to > > tell Mathematica that T = k/omega and that k is an integer and have > > *Mathematica* figure out what the Sin and Cos reduce to. > > > > It's all a question of expectation vs. reality of the language design, > > of course. Is my expectation unreasonable? > > Let me ask another (related) question. If you enter > > BesselJ[n+1/2,x] > > for k an integer what do you expect Mathematica to return? My point is > that closed-form formulas exist as a consequence of n being an integer. > How far through the system do you expect this functionality to extend? > > Cheers, > Paul > > ____________________________________________________________________ > Paul Abbott Phone: +61-8-9380-2734 > Department of Physics Fax: +61-8-9380-1014 > The University of Western Australia Nedlands WA 6907 > mailto:paul at physics.uwa.edu.au AUSTRALIA > http://www.pd.uwa.edu.au/~paul > > God IS a weakly left-handed dice player > ____________________________________________________________________ The message wasn't addressed to me, but I will respond. I want a language with object-oriented type declarations where I can declare a certain symbol to be integer, real, imaginary, rank 2 tensor etc. and have every symbolic function in the system recognize and process accordingly. I want numeric functions that do not return ridiculous, five-screen-long symbolic expressions when I make a mistake on symbols I declare to be numerical quantities, instead returning an error message informing me that no value has been entered for such and such a numeric quantity. I also want the system to behave just like mathematica does now if I do not declare a symbol specifically to be of a certain type.