Palette to Highlight and Substitute Same Subexpressions?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg26692] Palette to Highlight and Substitute Same Subexpressions?
- From: Adalbert Hanssen <hanssen at zeiss.de>
- Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 00:47:39 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hi, MathGroup, when (manually) simplifying complicated expressions, one frequently encounters the situation, that one recognizes subexpressions appearing over and over again. In this situation, first simplifying these subexperssions (and probably substituting new symbols for them), might turn down the complexity of the formula dramatically. The feasible order of substitutions depends however among others on the number of ocucurences of the subexpression in view. I am looking for something like this: First, in an OutputCell (most likely in InputForm, to make things simpler), I would select one of the repeating subexpressions (probably using Control-Shift-B to select parenthesized parts and later extend them as desired). Then I would press a button "count" of the looked-for palette and it would show me the number of occurrences of the selected subexpression within the OutputCell, in which the selection is (perhaps, the display might go to the status line of the notebook). If the count is high enough, I would like to press a button "color", which colors all occurences of the selected subexpression (in place, in the cell, in which I am working or, if this is easier to do, in a copy of this cell). Next I would like a button "substitute", which asks me for a substi- tution for the highlighted subexpression and all its siblings. The substitution should be performed, also the substitutions should accumulate in a buffer (list of rules). Finally I am looking for another button "paste", which pastes all the substitutions after "/." to the end of the cell, which generated the output cell and resets the substitution buffer. Thus, re-evaluating the cell with the appended substitutions would yield the result, which has been accumulated by using the palette (re-evaluating the cell might be less effective, as the result to be streamlined might have taken long to compute). If the looked for palette would be perfectly done, it would memorize the cell, on which the first substitution is done and complain, if it is applied to another cell with the substitution buffer not empty. Has any member of this group set up something similar? Has anybody ideas, how to create such a palette function? kind regards Dipl.-Math. Adalbert Hanszen