Issues with symbolic

[José Abílio Matos]

Hi,
        I hope this is the right forum for this. While working with symbolic 
I found two issues.

The first issue is that when defining a symbolic matrix:

# using sym
sym(zeros(20))

# using vpa
vpa(zeros(20))

Both options work but the former is much faster than the later, take as an 
example a square matrix of size 20:

>> tic; vpa(zeros(20)); toc
Elapsed time is 66.9637 seconds.
>> tic; sym(zeros(20)); toc
Elapsed time is 6.87813 seconds.

It gets worse for large matrices. Probably due the quadratic nature of the 
problem. :-)

I suspect that the problem is that there is a @sym/zeros method while vpa is 
just a function.


The second issue came when I was switching between double precision and vpa 
and it can be seen in the code below:

# Double precision (works)

N = zeros(3);
N (1:2:3, 1) = 1:2:3

# vpa (fails)

N = sym(zeros(3))
N(1:2:3,1) = sym(1:2:3)


The vpa case fails with
error: A(I,J,...) = X: dimensions mismatch
error: called from
    mat_replace at line 128 column 7
    subsasgn at line 101 column 13

The obvious fix is, of course, to use the transpose:
N(1:2:3,1) = (sym(1:2:3))'

My question are these issues worth to be reported to symbolics?

Best regards,
-- 
José Matos