How to do partial derivatives in Octave

Question

I'm working on a code in a group for a class. One of the biggest obstacles is figuring out a code to do partial derivatives. Octave is similar to Matlab syntax wise but it does not do symbols "sym". I'm kinda stuck as to how to go about doing a partial derivative in the program. It has to be done in Octave, it cannot be done in Matlab.

Answer 1

Basically just parroting what @rayryeng has said in his comment, but a small self-contained example to find the partial derivative of y(x, z) = x^2 + z^2 with respect to x:

pkg load symbolic
syms x z
y = x^2 + z^2
diff(y, x)

Gives the result:

ans = (sym) 2*x

Which is the correct partial derivative of y with respect to x. Note that to get this to work you will have to install the symbolic package. I found that I also needed to have the python package SymPy installed. There are some helpful instructions here.