[pstricks] PSTricks symbolic or numeric?

[John Frampton]

> John Frampton wrote:
> >>In my research group, our physicist uses Mathematica and
> >>describes it as symbolic math.  Our engineer uses Matlab
> >>and describes it as numeric.  Does PSTricks fall toward
> >>either of these category descriptions?
> >
> >
> > Neither.  Mathematica and Matlab are built to do mathematical
> > computations.  PSTricks is built to create and display graphical
> > representions, not to do the computations that produce them.
>
> not in general. The plotting functions of pst-plot and pst-3dplot
> can do both, computations and displaying the result of a
> 2d/3d function. The important difference is, that the
> algorithm or at least the math function has to be in UPN
> (postfix) notation. For functions there exists a infixplot
> package which converts an algebraic notation of a function
> into the stack orientated PostScript notation.

It may be true that PSTricks can do some computions, but
marginally compared with Mathematica or Matlab. Tex, after all,
can do things like compute binomial coefficients and lists of
prime numbers.  But that is not what Tex was built to do.
Similarly, PSTricks was not built to do mathematical computation.

John