Advanced Search

Question: Describing the length of an equation

Question:Describing the length of an equation

Annonymouse 160
character length
July 15 2016
1

My PhD involves generating equations that are very long, in some cases, more than 10 pages long.

For the reader its much more useful to have some of these equations described than presented. One of the descriptions I'd like to use is number of characters and intuitively the command Length feels like it should tell you the number of characters in an expr

However what is written on the help page for this function I don't understand:
https://www.maplesoft.com/support/help/maple/view.aspx?path=length

 

For other objects, the length of each operand of expr is computed recursively and added to the number of words used to represent expr. In this way, the measure of the size of expr is returned.

then the example that is given is

>length(x+2y)

length(x+2y)

99

 (5)

See Also

numelems

S


Could anyone explain to me what is meant when it is said length(x+2y)=9? if I try an apply things recursively the expression with the most chatracters i can generate is "x+y+y"which is only 5 characters.


Is there another command that would be better suited to my purposes?
Please Wait...