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From: | Colin Macdonald |
Subject: | Re: laguerre.m functions in specfun package |
Date: | Wed, 29 Apr 2015 14:58:20 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.5.0 |
On 29/04/15 06:46, Juan Pablo Carbajal wrote:
On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 6:30 PM, Carnë Draug <address@hidden> wrote:I am arguing that dirac and heaviside should be moved to the symbolic package. And then we drop the specfun package. See https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?8644#comment13I completely disagree with this. Symbolic does not offer replacement for these functions. Specially it is not true that multinom, multinom_coeff, multinom_exp -- I think these are monomials, and nthcoeff in the sym,bolic package (mind the "I think"). These functions are optimized for numeric not for symbolic manipulation (which by the way is the main role of octave). The symbolic version of these function will just ad an over heard in time execution and memory! Please always think of this when you want to replace a numerical version of a function with a symbolic one (please!). You should provide performance (time and memory) justifying the change.
I develop Symbolic but I have no particular agenda here either way: so long as I can rely on users having some of these functions for doubles.
re: performance: *generally speaking* function with symbolic arguments call e.g., "@sym/dirac.m", whereas with double arrays they call e.g., "@double/dirac.m" so there should be no cpu/mem performance penalty for numerical computing. I'm keen to ensure it stays that way.
In any case, if you want to get rid of specfun (I do not know why you would want that!), I would say be mindful if your are not a user of the package. Your interest might not coincide with the interest of the true/intended users.
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