Purpose and difference Symbolic Toolbox / MuPAD

Hi,

i'm a bit confused about the Symbolic Toolbox: Is it used to compute symbolics from within the Matlab interface (using the MuPAD kernel), whereas MuPAD is used as a standalone GUI? Is it possible to use MuPAD code/commands in Matlab or in MuPAD only?

Best regards

edit: ok, just found out that Matlab code and MuPAD code are not meant to be mixed, so M-code in Matlab and MuPAD-code in MuPAD only

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The Symbolic Toolbox provides an interface between MATLAB functions and the MuPad symbolic engine. This makes things a lot smoother than having to constantly import and export values between the two, such as by using subs() to get a numeric value in to a symbolic expression or using double() to convert a symbolic expression in to a numeric value.

There are a lot of facilities available in MuPad that are a nuisance to invoke from .m files, either because no specific interface was defined for them or because the MuPad syntax for them clashes with MATLAB's syntax. It can be valuable to work more directly in the MuPAD native interface for a chain of symbolic work -- especially if you are doing symbolic investigation and do not yet know the precise sequence of symbolic commands one is going to end up using to solve a particular problem.

[Max]

Hi, thank you for your detailed answer :)