Thread: Is it just me, or is the polynomial program popular?

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    Drunken Progammer CaptainMorgan's Avatar
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    Is it just me, or is the polynomial program popular?

    I now have to write one for a course, and I did one in C last year. I don't see the joy in them to be honest. I'd much rather develop something more business oriented, such as a database(using C/C++) with company info for just one example. So why do a lot of programming courses impose this program? What's your opinion? Is it just a mathematics thing? I understand that to Calculus, the polynomial is a nice function... but...

    -Cheers

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    C++ Witch laserlight's Avatar
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    What exactly is "the polynomial program"?
    Quote Originally Posted by Bjarne Stroustrup (2000-10-14)
    I get maybe two dozen requests for help with some sort of programming or design problem every day. Most have more sense than to send me hundreds of lines of code. If they do, I ask them to find the smallest example that exhibits the problem and send me that. Mostly, they then find the error themselves. "Finding the smallest program that demonstrates the error" is a powerful debugging tool.
    Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

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    Im going to assume it is a program that solves polynomials. The programming courses at my school tend compliment the math courses so it isnt that unusual.

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    Drunken Progammer CaptainMorgan's Avatar
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    Sorry about that, must've overlooked the General Discussion section.

    Ya, polynomial programs in general. So that's it, it's just a compliment to mathematics? Why isn't limits, trig identities and radical conjugates implemented? I dunno, it's no big deal, just curious.

    -Cheers

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    Frequently Quite Prolix dwks's Avatar
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    Why isn't limits, trig identities and radical conjugates implemented?
    Perhaps the creaters of the course thought you'd have your hands full with a polynomial program. Maybe it's a tradition, like "Hello, world!" and a calculator and hangman.
    dwk

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    Quote Originally Posted by dwks
    Perhaps the creaters of the course thought you'd have your hands full with a polynomial program. Maybe it's a tradition, like "Hello, world!" and a calculator and hangman.
    Never done a single one of those .
    I was flipping through my Calculus II book today, and saw in like the 3rd to last section they said that computer scientist love polynomial functions because of their simplicity.
    Yeah, they didn't look so simple in the back of a Calculus book.

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    Well, one thing that's nice about polynomials from a pedagogical perspective is that there are a lot of different ways to represent them (e.g., represent the exponents implicitly as positions in a list), so depending on what you have to do, they give you some design choices to think about.

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