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DJF16-Pearl
16-Pearl
June 12, 2019
Question

Symbolics Glitch

Mathcad suddenly started me giving me some extra results in my symbolics.  Files that worked fine before suddenly show "keyword_explicit" in the result.  The file works fine on other users computers so I expect I need to reinstall Mathcad.  But maybe someone has seen a fix for this before.  (4.0 attached)

Thanks,

 

Simple example:
2019-06-12_9-22-42.png

7 replies

LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
June 12, 2019

Shouldn't you put 'explicit' on the same line as the 'solve', but separated with a comma ',' (from the 'Q') ?

 

Luc

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DJF16-PearlAuthor
16-Pearl
June 12, 2019

I don't believe that's required.  I've been doing multiple lines like this for a long time.  In this particular case (in a functioning copy) I get the same answer with the explicit above, below or on the same line with a comma.  In my malfunctioning copy none of them work.

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Werner_E
Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
June 12, 2019

Looks like you found a bug in Prime 4, which was fixed in Prime 5.

Nevertheless to get what you probably are looking for you should use "explicit,ALL" or at least "explicit,P".

You wrote "The file works fine on other users computers". Are those computers running Prime 4 as well?

Here is what I see in Prime 4:

P4.png

and here is what I see in Prime 5 (after recalc, of course):

P5.png

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DJF16-PearlAuthor
16-Pearl
June 12, 2019

That's very interesting.  I was expecting it to be a corrupted installation but you're getting the same issue.  However, I've been using 4.0 for years with the exact same files and never seen this before.  The other users were also using 4.0 and it seems to work.  Maybe a Windows update changed something? (running win 7) But I agree 5.0 seems to work (I just can't use it to maintain corporate compatibility)  

  

explicit,ALL allows the value of P to enter so that wouldn't help much.  And in the real files there's more than just P defined so I didn't want to spell out each variable.  I can overcome this particular file with some CLEARs, but wanted to understand what was going on.

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Werner_E
Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
June 12, 2019

I am running Prime 4 under Win10-1809 and had Prime 5 installed later in parallel.
It interesting that you say that you did not experience this effect in the past when you still used Prime 4. I never noticed this effect, too, but thats not surprising as I don't use Prime for anything serious and I seldom use "excplicit".

 

>explicit,ALL allows the value of P to enter so that wouldn't help much. 

I thought that was the idea to show the value of P in the result. Why else would you use "explicit"?

And what do you mean by "it allows the value of P to enter"?

 

In general I think that "explicit" has lost a lot of its power for documenting a calculation because we can't suppress the display of the keywords in Prime. So its looks really ugly.

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