A system for manipulating polynomials given by straight-line programs

Abstract

We discuss the design, implementation, and benchmarking of a system that can manipulate symbolic expressions represented by their straight-line computations. Our system is capable of performing rational arithmetic, evaluating, differentiating, taking greatest common divisors of, and factoring polynomials in straight-line format. The straight-line results can also be converted to standard sparse format. We show by example that our system can handle problems for which conventional methods lead to excessive intermediate expression swell.