Writing some class worksheets yesterday exposed me to our inconsistencies in numerical integration commands. Currently:
* numerical_integral calls gsl to do integration, and the syntax is numerical_integral(f, start, end) or numerical_integral(f, (start, end)). * if you have a symbolic expression f, then f.nintegrate(var, start, end) uses maxima to compute the numerical integral. This returns several more arguments than the GSL version above. * nintegrate/nintegral is not a top-level command Here's a proposal: * A single top-level command nintegrate/nintegral, which calls the object's nintegral method, if it exists; otherwise, convert to SR and call the nintegral method. This mirrors the integral top-level command. * Enhance the SR .nintegral method to have an algorithm option: - algorithm='gsl' (default) -- call the gsl numerical integration. In a simple test of integrating sin(x) from 2 to 4, gsl was about 10 times faster than the current algorithm of calling maxima. Also, change the gsl command to accept a variable of integration argument, which it then uses when constructing the fast_float version of the expression if it is symbolic. - algorithm='scipy' -- call the scipy numerical integration routines (maybe make this the default if it is faster than gsl). - algorithm='maxima' -- use maxima numerical integration - maybe a sympy option too? Also, I noticed that we have both "integral" and "integrate" as identical top-level commands. What is the purpose? This seems like needless clutter. What do people think of deprecating one or the other (I suggest keeping "integrate" and deprecating "integral"). Thanks, Jason -- Jason Grout --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
