Daniel Russel wrote: > On Mar 27, 2008, at 12:43 PM, Ben Webb wrote: >> The existing checks are for analytic derivatives. If you also want to >> check numerical derivatives, that would certainly make sense. > I assume you mean the existing checks are "analytic checks of > derivatives" and "check derivatives numerically", right? How the > derivative is evaluated internally doesn't really matter for how we do > the checking.
The Python code defines the function and its derivative analytically. Of course it has no bearing on how the C++ code defines the function. Yes, we could write Python code to calculate numerical derivatives, but this seems unnecessary to me because I know that the derivative of x^3 is 3x^2 and so can just write that in the Python code. That's what's done in the existing patch.
Ben