Re: Extracting Re and Im parts of a symbolic expression
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg42143] Re: Extracting Re and Im parts of a symbolic expression
- From: AES/newspost <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 04:57:39 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <bcrqks$hl9$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
In article <bcrqks$hl9$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl> wrote:
> All that this amounts really is that ComplexExpand may not be the
> most fortunate name for this particular function. If instead it was
> called EvaluateAssumingThatAllVariablesAreRealExceptTheSpecifiedOnes,
> would it make it clearer?
Perhaps including built-functions such as
RealPart[expr] <==> ComplexExpand[Re[expr]]
ImagPart[expr] <==> ComplexExpand[Im[expr]]
(where "<==>" means "exactly equivalent to")
would have been (still would be?) a useful design decision.
[Obviously extensions like these can always be generated by the user,
and obviously there's a design trade-off between restricting the syntax
of a language to nothing but severe primitives versus including in the
language too many excessively specialized functions. IMHO including
something akin to the above would have been useful.]