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. 

