On 6/25/07, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> > So this is at least a pretty significant missed opportunity
> > on Maxima's part. Maxima developers: Yes/no?
>
> No. The integrate routine should do these right. This is simply (well,
> "simply") a limitation (verging on a bug) in integrate. I have no idea how
> easy or hard this would be to fix. Obviously the trivial approach -- have
> integrate try integrating term by term if integrating the whole thing
> doesn't work -- would be very easy to implement, but in the vast majority of
> cases, this would simply perform redundant work and not change the result.
OK. I have to say that the reported result was somewhat surprising to me.
I believe at least one other symbolic computation system allows
the user to specify how much time to waste working on a problem.
With more time available, additional heuristics could be applied.
> As for "the linearity was applied too late" in your example, this is working
> exactly as it is supposed to.
Agreed. Perhaps I should have said "applied too late to be helpful
for this problem". I am thinking linearity can be applied by the
integrate system (not just the simplifier that sees the 'integrate
noun after the fact).
Robert