Symbolics Glitch

[DJF]

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:

[LucMeekes]

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

Luc

[DJF]

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.

[Werner_E]

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:

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

[DJF]

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.

[Werner_E]

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.

[DJF]

I generally use 'explicit' to not show numeric values.  This is the effect I'm used to seeing (see pic).  P remains a P instead of switching to 30.   Whether that's its intended use I'm not sure, but it is awfully handy.

[Werner_E]

I see! Guess its not the intended use, so it may be subject to change without notice. On the other hand I don't think that PTC will change much with respect to the symbolics.