Advice: Singularities in piecewise functions

With few exceptions, Maple evaluates the arguments to a function before the function itself is called. In particular, this happens for the piecewise function. Thus, even though the result is only the first case corresponding to a true condition, all the cases will be evaluated.

One situation where this behaviour can cause errors is when one of the cases has a singularity. For example:

> f:= x -> piecewise(x < 1, 1, 1/x):

> f(0);

Error, (in f) division by zero

At the condition is true, so f(0) might be expected to evaluate to 1. However, the 1/x is still evaluated with x replaced by 0 , and this produces the error. One way to work around the problem is to use traperror to intercept the error.

> f:= x -> piecewise(x < 1, 1, traperror(1/x)):

> f(0);

This may not be a completely satisfactory solution, however. It is still not possible to evaluate f(x) and then substitute x=0 , because f(x) evaluates to (the 1/x evaluates without an error, and so traperror has no effect). Moreover, this method won't help if you really want to avoid evaluating all the cases (e.g. if the calculations involved would be very time-consuming). An alternative is to avoid the use of piecewise , instead defining a procedure using an if statement.

> f:= x -> if not type(x,constant) then 'f(x)' elif x < 1 then 1 else 1/x fi:

> f(0);

Note that the first condition not type(x,constant) is needed to allow the use of f(x) when x is a symbolic variable or expression, for which the x < 1 test would not return a value of or .

> f(x);

See also: if , piecewise , traperror

Maple Advisor Database, R. Israel 1997