Symbolic Math Toolbox

Supplementing This Guide with Command-Line Help

As a supplement to this guide, you can find information on Symbolic Math Toolbox functions using the MATLAB command line help system. You can obtain help for all MATLAB functions by typing

• help function
  

where function is the name of the MATLAB function for which you need help.

The Symbolic Math Toolbox "overloads" many of the numeric functions of MATLAB. That is, it provides symbolic-specific implementations of the functions, using the same function name. To obtain help for the symbolic version of an overloaded function, type

• help sym/function
  

where function is the overloaded function's name. For example, to obtain help on the symbolic version of the overloaded function, diff, type

• help sym/diff
  

To obtain information on the numeric version, type

• help diff
  

To determine whether a function is overloaded, check whether the help for the numeric version contains a section "Overloaded methods" that has a reference help sym/function.m. For example, the help for the diff function contains the section

• Overloaded methods
      help char/diff.m
      help sym/diff.m
  

This tells you that there are two other diff commands that operate on expressions of class char and class sym, respectively. See the next section for information on class sym. See the MATLAB topic Programming and Data Types for more information on overloaded commands.

You can use the mhelp command to obtain help on Maple commands. For example, to obtain help on the Maple diff command, type mhelp diff. This returns the help page for the Maple diff function. For more information on the mhelp command, type help mhelp or read the section Using Maple Functions.

Using This Guide

Demos