30,203 research outputs found
Can Computer Algebra be Liberated from its Algebraic Yoke ?
So far, the scope of computer algebra has been needlessly restricted to exact
algebraic methods. Its possible extension to approximate analytical methods is
discussed. The entangled roles of functional analysis and symbolic programming,
especially the functional and transformational paradigms, are put forward. In
the future, algebraic algorithms could constitute the core of extended symbolic
manipulation systems including primitives for symbolic approximations.Comment: 8 pages, 2-column presentation, 2 figure
Towards a Holistic Integration of Spreadsheets with Databases: A Scalable Storage Engine for Presentational Data Management
Spreadsheet software is the tool of choice for interactive ad-hoc data
management, with adoption by billions of users. However, spreadsheets are not
scalable, unlike database systems. On the other hand, database systems, while
highly scalable, do not support interactivity as a first-class primitive. We
are developing DataSpread, to holistically integrate spreadsheets as a
front-end interface with databases as a back-end datastore, providing
scalability to spreadsheets, and interactivity to databases, an integration we
term presentational data management (PDM). In this paper, we make a first step
towards this vision: developing a storage engine for PDM, studying how to
flexibly represent spreadsheet data within a database and how to support and
maintain access by position. We first conduct an extensive survey of
spreadsheet use to motivate our functional requirements for a storage engine
for PDM. We develop a natural set of mechanisms for flexibly representing
spreadsheet data and demonstrate that identifying the optimal representation is
NP-Hard; however, we develop an efficient approach to identify the optimal
representation from an important and intuitive subclass of representations. We
extend our mechanisms with positional access mechanisms that don't suffer from
cascading update issues, leading to constant time access and modification
performance. We evaluate these representations on a workload of typical
spreadsheets and spreadsheet operations, providing up to 20% reduction in
storage, and up to 50% reduction in formula evaluation time
Specific "scientific" data structures, and their processing
Programming physicists use, as all programmers, arrays, lists, tuples,
records, etc., and this requires some change in their thought patterns while
converting their formulae into some code, since the "data structures" operated
upon, while elaborating some theory and its consequences, are rather: power
series and Pad\'e approximants, differential forms and other instances of
differential algebras, functionals (for the variational calculus), trajectories
(solutions of differential equations), Young diagrams and Feynman graphs, etc.
Such data is often used in a [semi-]numerical setting, not necessarily
"symbolic", appropriate for the computer algebra packages. Modules adapted to
such data may be "just libraries", but often they become specific, embedded
sub-languages, typically mapped into object-oriented frameworks, with
overloaded mathematical operations. Here we present a functional approach to
this philosophy. We show how the usage of Haskell datatypes and - fundamental
for our tutorial - the application of lazy evaluation makes it possible to
operate upon such data (in particular: the "infinite" sequences) in a natural
and comfortable manner.Comment: In Proceedings DSL 2011, arXiv:1109.032
Extended Rate, more GFUN
We present a software package that guesses formulae for sequences of, for
example, rational numbers or rational functions, given the first few terms. We
implement an algorithm due to Bernhard Beckermann and George Labahn, together
with some enhancements to render our package efficient. Thus we extend and
complement Christian Krattenthaler's program Rate, the parts concerned with
guessing of Bruno Salvy and Paul Zimmermann's GFUN, the univariate case of
Manuel Kauers' Guess.m and Manuel Kauers' and Christoph Koutschan's
qGeneratingFunctions.m.Comment: 26 page
A computer algebra user interface manifesto
Many computer algebra systems have more than 1000 built-in functions, making
expertise difficult. Using mock dialog boxes, this article describes a proposed
interactive general-purpose wizard for organizing optional transformations and
allowing easy fine grain control over the form of the result even by amateurs.
This wizard integrates ideas including:
* flexible subexpression selection;
* complete control over the ordering of variables and commutative operands,
with well-chosen defaults;
* interleaving the choice of successively less main variables with applicable
function choices to provide detailed control without incurring a combinatorial
number of applicable alternatives at any one level;
* quick applicability tests to reduce the listing of inapplicable
transformations;
* using an organizing principle to order the alternatives in a helpful
manner;
* labeling quickly-computed alternatives in dialog boxes with a preview of
their results,
* using ellipsis elisions if necessary or helpful;
* allowing the user to retreat from a sequence of choices to explore other
branches of the tree of alternatives or to return quickly to branches already
visited;
* allowing the user to accumulate more than one of the alternative forms;
* integrating direct manipulation into the wizard; and
* supporting not only the usual input-result pair mode, but also the useful
alternative derivational and in situ replacement modes in a unified window.Comment: 38 pages, 12 figures, to be published in Communications in Computer
Algebr
- …