{"id":987,"date":"2009-04-08T15:00:35","date_gmt":"2009-04-08T14:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=987"},"modified":"2009-04-08T15:06:11","modified_gmt":"2009-04-08T14:06:11","slug":"minor-documentation-goof-in-matlab-2009a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=987","title":{"rendered":"Minor documentation goof in MATLAB 2009a"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was discussing the (relatively) new Symbolic Toolbox for MATLAB with someone yesterday and found the need to trawl through the documentation.\u00a0 There is a command called mfun<\/strong> in the symbolic toolbox which allows you to numerically evaluate various special functions such as Dawson’s integral or the digamma function.\u00a0 Let’s look at the output of\u00a0 help mfun<\/strong> in MATLAB 2009a.\u00a0 The bold highlights are mine.<\/p>\n

help mfun
\nMFUN\u00a0\u00a0 Numeric evaluation of a special function.
\nMFUN(‘fun’,p1,p2,…,pk), where ‘fun’ is the name of a Maple<\/strong>
\nfunction and the p’s are numeric quantities corresponding to fun’s
\nparameters.\u00a0 The last parameter specified may be a matrix. All other
\nparameters must be the type specified by the Maple<\/strong> function.
\nMFUN numerically evaluates ‘fun’ with the specified parameters
\nand returns MATLAB doubles. Any singularity in ‘fun’ is returned
\nas NaN.<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course, it should be MuPAD rather than Maple these days :-)\u00a0 The text in the help browser is correct though and refers to MuPAD throughout.<\/p>\n

What’s more if you do help mfunlist<\/strong> in MATLAB 2009a (to list all of the functions supported by mfun) then near the end of the list you’ll get the following extract<\/p>\n

Orthogonal Polynomials (Extended Symbolic Math Toolbox only)
\nT\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 n,x\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Chebyshev of the First Kind
\nU\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 n,x\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Chebyshev of the Second Kind<\/em><\/p>\n

However, the Extended Symbolic Toolbox was discontinued from MATLAB 2008b onwards and all of the Orthogonal Polynomials mentioned in the help file are now available in new symbolic toolbox as standard.<\/p>\n

This is no big deal (Walking Randomly probably has MANY more typos than this for example) and after a change as major as swapping the Maple toolbox for the Mupad one I guess things such as this should be expected from time to time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was discussing the (relatively) new Symbolic Toolbox for MATLAB with someone yesterday and found the need to trawl through the documentation.\u00a0 There is a command called mfun in the symbolic toolbox which allows you to numerically evaluate various special functions such as Dawson’s integral or the digamma function.\u00a0 Let’s look at the output of\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-matlab"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-fV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":991,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}