On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 08:04:32PM +0200, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
> Dmitry Pavlov wants "adult" numerics in Racket, and he adds:
> 
> >- I need to take derivatives of equations that I wrote in my DSL,
> >symbolically, and have them converted to C too.
> 
> And then, people (Robby Findler and John Clements) mentioned Siskind. Good.
> 
> However, you should know that Jeffrey worked NOT on /symbolic/
> derivatives, but mainly on the "automatic differentiation" stuff;
> this is numeric, but fast and exact (in the sense: no differential
> quotient approximations). There is plenty of valuable papers written
> by Jeffrey and Barak Pearlmutter... (But some are quite difficult).

I am baffled how you can do differentiation numerically and get it exact.

> 
> If Dmitry is interested in numerical computations, and the "symbolic
> layer" would serve just to code some horrible "C", or similar, then
> please, the automatic differentiation /*is*/ the direction to
> follow.
> 
> Symbolic derivatives used then in numeric computations need a strong
> simplification package, otherwise the computations usually become
> very inefficient.

I understand needing a simplification pass -- naive symbolic 
differentiation tends to copy a lot of subexpressions.

-- hendrik

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