Every so often, MAthcad 15 surprises me!

[-MFra-]

Every so often, MAthcad 15 surprises me!

[LucMeekes · Accepted solution]

Mathcad 11 / Maple:

Luc

[Werner_E]

Looks like Maple in MC11 ignores the possibility of a being zero. In this case the result of Maple in MC11 is wrong!

Admittedly MC15's answer without this specific "assume" is wrong in the same sense, too 🙂

[LucMeekes]

Maybe it's not so wrong...

Note that the taylor-series of exp(a*x) is 1+ a*x+a^2*x^2/2+...

so in (exp(a*x)-1)/a, the 1 is subtracted out by -1,the next term divided by a leaves x, and the following terms all become 0 when a=0.

Luc

[Werner_E]

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@LucMeekes wrote:

Maybe it's not so wrong...

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Not so, yes, but its still problematic to write a division by "a" without stating that "a" does not equal zero.

I would have expected to see some kind of if-statement as we see it from Mathcad/muPAd/Maple on many other occasions, too.

[Werner_E]

So again we learn that Mathcad and its symbolics by far is not perfect - not even MC11 & Maple 😉