Evaluate In Place
- To: mathgroup@smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg11931] Evaluate In Place
- From: Des Penny <penny@suu.edu>
- Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 00:33:32 -0400
- Organization: Southern Utah University
Hi Groupers: I find the new feature (at least I think it's new with V3.0) of Evaluating In Place to be extremely useful for debugging purposes. Since I haven't seen it discussed in this forum I thought a note might be appropriate. The command is executed by selecting part of the input line and executing the pull down command Kernel>Evaluation>Evaluate In Place. A simple example is: In[15]:= x=3; Now consider the following cell: x^2+2x Select x^2 and evaluate in place. Now repeat with 2x. You will get in turn: 9+2x 9+6 A more interesting example is the following expression: In[19]:= x=.; expr=(1-x)/(3(x^2+2x y)) Out[19]= (1 - x)/(3*(x^2 + 2*y*x)) My students have some trouble understanding the internal form of expressions like this. If we look at: In[20]:= FullForm[expr] Out[20]//FullForm= Times[Rational[1,3],Plus[1,Times[-1,x]], Power[Plus[Power[x,2],Times[2,x,y]],-1]] By selecting and evaluating in place Times[-1,x] we get: Times[Rational[1,3], Plus[1,-x],Power[Plus[Power[x,2],Times[2,x,y]],-1]] We can now select and evaluate in place parts of the expression to get in turn: Times[Rational[1,3],1-x,Power[Plus[Power[x,2],Times[2,x,y]],-1]] Times[Rational[1,3],1-x,Power[Plus[x^2,2 x y],-1]] Times[Rational[1,3],1-x,Power[x^2 + 2*x*y,-1]] Times[Rational[1,3],1-x,1/(x^2 + 2*x*y)] And finally: In[30]:= Times[1/3,1-x,1/(x^2 + 2*x*y)] Out[30]= (1 - x)/(3*(x^2 + 2*x*y)) What a great debugging tool! When faced with a deeply nested Mathematica expression, it is now no longer necessary to physically break it apart and execute each part in a separate cell. You can now execute each portion in place and understand its effect. Cheers, -- Des Penny Physical Science Dept. Southern Utah University Cedar City, UT 84720 Office: (435) 586-7708 FAX: (435) 865-8051 email: penny@suu.edu Home: (435) 586-2286 email: dpenny@iname.com