RE: Matching Or expressions
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg72275] RE: [mg72250] Matching Or expressions
- From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
- Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2006 06:20:37 -0500 (EST)
Johan, The short answer is that you want to use HoldPattern[Or[_]]. MatchQ[And[p, q], HoldPattern[Or[_]]] False The reason is that MatchQ evaluates its arguments. Or[x] x and Or[_] _ which is a pattern that will match anything! David Park djmp at earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/ From: Johan Grönqvist [mailto:johan.gronqvist at gmail.com] The context of my problem is explained below. I wish to distinguish expressions of the form And[p,q] from those of the form Or[p,q], but the only thing I find is MatchQ[myExpr, Or[_]] and to my surprise I see that MatchQ[And[p,q],Or[_]] is True. Thus I can not use this to match only the Or-expressions. Thanks Johan The context is as follows: I wish to find the number of solutions to a diophantine equation with a finite number of solutions. I do the following sols = Reduce[eqns, vars, Integers] and this gives me an expression that normally looks like Or[_,_,_] if there are several solutions, or something else if there are not. Now I wish to find the number of solutions using Which[MatchQ[sols, Or[_]], Length[sols], DoOtherStuff] The problem is that the MatchQ[ expr, Or[_] ] also matches e.g. (x==2 && y==4), which is only one solution.