From help-request at octave dot org Thu Jan 5 16:07:46 2006 Subject: Re: rational numbers only From: Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso To: help at octave dot org Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 16:06:09 -0600 On 1/5/06, John W. Eaton wrote: > You could also write a new user-defined data type for rational > numbers. I suppose this could be an interesting exercise, but who would use the finished product? Not me, personally. It is already implemented in other software packages and seems of little use for the kind of person who uses Octave, the kind usually interested in numerical analysis. The number theorists have Pari, group theorists use GAP, and for anything else that requires symbolic manipulations we have general-purpose CASes. Since Octave is *nix software, I usually prefer the philosophy of one tool doing one job and doing it well (but then again, M-x praise-be-unto-emacs). Swiss army knives are tools of The Devil, RMS, and Bill Gates. :) > it would be a lot of work to get something like svd of a > rational matrix working (if that would even make sense). This could make sense too, if you want to extend the previous exercise, in order to include a radical datatype. You could have some fun simplifying radicals, a task more difficult to program than it might seem at first sight, because then we start dipping our toes into (baby?) Galois theory. - Jordi ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------