On Aug 21, 10:39 pm, Tim Lahey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Aug 21, 2008, at 10:22 PM, Jason Merrill wrote: > > > That sounds good too, as long as boundary conditions are input in the > > form of equations rather than grunts. I like it a little less in the > > case that you don't want to supply any boundary conditions--then you'd > > have to supply an empty list to avoid resorting to keywords, right? > > On the other hand, it might make it a little easier if you wanted to > > try the same equation with a bunch of different sets of boundary > > conditions or something like that. And as for "useful in the solution > > process", I don't mind if the parser has to work hard on my behalf ;-) > > Yes, I've found that since you're often getting the boundary conditions > and the equations separately, it's easier to have them as two separate > lists. If I remember correctly, this is what Maple does. Yes, if there > are no boundary conditions, you'd have to provide an empty list. I > don't think that's really much of a problem.
I've never used Maple, but the Wikipedia example shows equation and boundary conditions in a single list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_(software)#Solution_of_linear_differential_equations, which is the same as Mathematica and my earlier suggestion. The thing I don't like about an empty list is that it doesn't really represent anything mathematical, and things like that which only serve to please a parser are harder to learn and remember. If you are given the equations and boundary conditions as separate lists, it's pretty easy to combine them: dsolve(eqns+bcs,y,x) though the concatenation operator being + is unfortunate in a mathematical context. Also, it's annoying if one of eqns or bcs is actually a single element and not a list. JM --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
