Symbolic Arithmetic

This example shows how Symbolic Tools undertakes symbolic arithmetic.

 library symbolic;                      // define the library
 call symstate(reset);                  // turns on symbolic processing
 
 // Symbolic matrix
  txt = " xmat = symmat(2,2,{a,b,c,d}); 
          xd = det(xmat);" ;  
  call symrun(txt);
  xd = symget("xd");
  "\n det(xmat):        " xd;

The symmat command allows GAUSS to define a symbolic matrix.  The kernel evaluates the code in txt and the symbolic determinant is returned as a string.

The output from this example is :

	det(xmat): a*d-b*c