Re: In search of cool Scheme

[Hans O. Lowe]

Sometime on Thursday, Harvey J. Stein wrote:

> My point is that you get to be able to evaluate the derivative at
> specific points for free.  In other languages you'd have to write an
> evaluator to be able to use the symbolic derivative.

You're absolutely right about being about to evaluated the result (if
I understand you correctly). The beauty of Lisp is, you get a
symbolic result from 'differentiate', which you can either pass along
to another function, or apply it to the numerical values as you
mentioned. Though I would say it is done at a very low cost, rather
than 'free'. :)

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