3 ms·

how would one define SolvePoly or even Take for that matter in terms of Mathematica if it were not "built in"? I am not saying it is impossible (I really do not

• yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Same way you would do it in lisp - you'd build a function to do pattern matching and use conditionals to test which pattern is matched. (defun solve-poly (p) (if (match '(+ (* ?a x) ?b) poly)) (-b/a where b, a come from (extract-values-from-pattern-match poly)) (some code for second order) )) (Some code borrowed from lispm's comment. Not sure which library the match function comes from.)