differential equations

[Anders]

This is another example of where the CAS system does not return the result in a canonical form. Unfortunately, it also happens in a few places, e.g. various transformations like Laplace, Z etc. While CAS produces mathematically correct results, it is sometimes far away from what the user expects (canonical form) and it takes time (some times a lot of time) to figure out how to convert the result into a familiar form that the user can interpret and understand it's physical meaning (e.g. in physics, EE, control theory etc).

Since CAS is not using table look up as a method to produce results but is using generalized algorithms (which I think is actually a strength because it can therefore cover more complex situation generally).

However, it would be great to have a sort of normalization algorithm as a last step that the user could invoke (kind of like the "simplify" button) to normalize a result into canonical form and/or with an option to auto normalize (through a setting).

I've been toying with the idea to write a program that does this.
I was thinking write a parser that parse the input and call CAS term-wise and then have the program put together the result in canonical form, but it became too complex because you have to normalize the input first anyway. So some work.