One way (not the only) to do this is to use the positional derivative
package; an example
(%i1) display2d : false;
(%o1) FALSE
(%i2) diff(f(2*x/l-1),x);
(%o2) 2*PDERIVOP(f,1)(2*x/L-1)/L
(%i3) diff(f(xi(x)),x,2);
(%o3)
PDERIVOP(XI,1)(x)^2*PDERIVOP(f,2)(XI(x))+PDERIVOP(XI,2)(x)*PDERIVOP(f,1)(XI(x))
(%i4) diff(f(x+t),x)-diff(f(x+t),t);
(%o4) 0
(%i5) diff(f(x,y),x,1,y,1);
(%o5) PDERIVOP(f,1,1)(x,y)
(%i6)
If the pderivop stuff bothers you, set display2d to true and the
output will look nicer. Documentation for pdiff is in share/contrib/pdiff.
The function 'depends' should require that each argument is a
symbol. I once wrote a replacement for depends that checks
for this and few other things. I'll look for it.
Let me know if you have questions (I wrote pdiff). Good luck.
Barton
Kamaraju Kusumanchi <kk288@cornell.edu>
Sent by: maxima-admin@math.utexas.edu
05/28/2004 06:34 PM
To: maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu
cc:
Subject: [Maxima] applying chain rule in maxima
I have an unknown function f which depends on xi. xi in turn depends of
x. Now I want to evaluate df/dx. This is what I did after reading the
manual.
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