Re: Symbolic toolbox help?

[Quentin Spencer]

Ron Crummett wrote:

> Hi -
>
> How do you use the Symbolic toolbox?  I have seen a lot of information 
> in the mailing list archives regarding its existence, but have been 
> unable to acutally do anything with it.  Just a couple pointers should 
> be fine; for instance, using the 'differentiate' function.  Thanks.


I'll assume you have it installed already as a part of octave-forge, as 
a previous poster pointed out. I've never actually used it before, so I 
took a look. It seriously needs better documentation, but here's an 
example I was able to create:

octave:1> symbols
octave:2> x=sym('x');
octave:3> differentiate(x^2,x)
ans =

(2.0)*x


It appears you must first run the symbols command to initialize the use 
of symbolic math. Not doing so causes an error when I type the third 
command above. Anyway, I hope this gets you started. If you want to send 
some documentation patches, they would be welcome. Particularly, I think 
help symbols should give more information and have a long list of see 
alsos to get someone using the toolbox started.

-Quentin



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