[SciPy-dev] complex wrapper to ode

[Pauli Virtanen]

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:25:45 +0000, John Travers wrote:
> Attached is a patch which adds a wrapper class 'zode' to integrate.ode.
> It allows one to conviniently solve systems of odes with complex values
> using the existing real valued solvers vode, dopri5, dop853, instead of
> zode, by simply integrating the real/imag parts.
> 
> Is this worth commiting?

Looks good to me, and may be generally useful, so I'm +1

But before committing, I'd suggest a couple of things:

- The name 'zode' is slightly confusing vs. ZVODE and not very
  descriptive. Maybe 'complex_ode' would be better?

  This would leave us wiggle room later on with the naming...

- Is it possible to do the real -> complex switch automatically,
  based on the type of return value from (a trial evaluation of) f?

  On a second thought, this might be brittle.

- Since 'ode' supports Jacobians, it'd be nice if the wrapper supported
  them, too.

> It appears to me to be considerably faster than
> zvode for my big systems of equations. I'm not sure why, as I
> intuitively thought all the data copying etc. would slow it down.

Is your RHS an analytic function of all of the variables? The ZVODE docs 
seem to mention this as a requirement. But I don't know if the ZVODE 
implementation itself is supposed to be fast.

-- 
Pauli Virtanen