Math::Symbolic version 0.111 ============================ Math::Symbolic is intended to offer symbolic calculation capabilities to the Perl programmer without using external (and commercial) libraries and/or applications. Unless, however, some interested and knowledgable developers turn up to participate in the development, the library will be severely limited by my experience in the area. Symbolic calculations are an active field of research in CS. Some information on the state of things: The interface has been improving steadily. Nonetheless, it'll take some more polishing. Since version 0.08, a parser for algebraic expressions is integrated into Math::Symbolic. Since version 0.106, the parser also parses unknown variables, and since version 0.109, it parses variable signatures. Since version 0.102, there is an overloaded interface for arithmetic operators and some overloadable functions and contexts. The interface is not optimally documented. Please also refer to the tests and example programs. Partial derivatives of logarithms, exponentiations, arithmetic terms (*,/,+,- and unary minus as well as variables and constants), trigonometric functions, inverse trigonometric functions, hyperbolic functions, and area hyperbolic functions work rather well - albeit slowly. Simplification of algebraic terms is severely limited at this time and its interface has been significantly refactored in version 0.111. Since then, all method calls that start with 'is_', 'test_', 'apply_', or 'mod_' are delegated to a special namespace that is populated from user-defined modules. Additionally, all builtin tree-modifying and tree-testing methods have been moved to the aforementioned namespace. INSTALLATION To install this module type the following: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install DEPENDENCIES This module requires these other modules and libraries: Test::More Exporter Parse::RecDescent SEE ALSO Current versions of this module may be found on CPAN or http://steffen-mueller.net COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE Copyright (C) 2003 Steffen Mueller Author can be reached at symbolic-module at steffen-mueller dot net This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.