behavior of 'hipow'



Hipow is a purely syntactic (i.e. mathematically superficial) function.  As
its documentation says, it "Returns the highest explicit exponent of <x> in
<expr>. "

So it treats 'diff' just as it treats any other unknown function:

     hipow(f(x^3),x) => 3

This is correct even though f(x) might later be defined as := 0 or := x^40,
since it is doing a purely syntactic operation.

     hipow('diff(x^3,x),x) => 3

Again, this is a purely syntactic operation.  Hipow doesn't 'know' that diff
is an operator; it treats it as simply an unknown function. In particular,
hipow(diff(x^3,x),x) (without the quote on 'diff') is of course 2 since the
differentiation has been carried out.

            -s

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 10:46, Todd Hay <haymaker at mail.utexas.edu> wrote:

> ipow(dif