Re: definite integral of arbitrary function

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 27 April 2012 05:55, rdurkacz <address@hidden> wrote:

> Sorry if I am missing something basic. I first tried with MathCad,
> now with with Octave assuming it does the same as Matlab. ie I am a
> beginner with Octave if that is not obvious.

You are misunderstanding what Octave's purpose is. Octave is not a
CAS. Neither is Matlab. Octave is a numerical computing environment,
with little to no support for symbolic manipulation. Recent versions
of Matlab do have symbolic manipulation available, but Matlab is still
primarily a numerical computation tool. Octave works with hardware
floats, with numerical approximations. Not with symbolic functions.
Neither Matlab nor Octave is comparable to Mathcad, just like Audacity
is not comparable to Gimp, despite both of them doing sophisticated
signal processing. If you want something like Mathcad, try Sage:

    http://sagemath.org/

HTH,
- Jordi G. H.