Hi, Funnily, I was thinking about writing something like that those last days, to implement some dimension-agnostic linear algebra expressions with dimension known at compile-time. Obviously it wouldn't only involve derivatives, but what you show is quite close to what I had in mind in terms of syntax. So I'm interested :-) BTW Steven's right: proto is definitely the right tool to do that. On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 7:41 PM, John Maddock <john@johnmaddock.co.uk> wrote:
2) Isn't it easier to just calculate the derivative within a symbolic math package and then cut and paste the result into your code (Yacas is free for example)?
From my point of view, the main interest would be to compute expressions containing some compile-time values provided by the user. For example I want to calculate the volume of a hypersphere which is: (pi^(N/2)*r^N) / gamma(N/2 + 1), with dimension N known at compile-time. If the user happens to work only with N=2, that is circles, I want the resulting expression to be as effective as a hand-written pi*r^2 (the volume of a hypersphere<2> is the area of a circle). It's technically feasible.
Bruno