Eigenvector mystery

[John Keith]

Thanks everyone for the enlightening explanations, though most of the material is above my level of mathematical knowledge.

I was reading Valentin's excellent article "Boldly Going - Eigenvalues and Friends" and that led me to another somewhat off-topic question.

The HP 50g command PCAR (characteristic polynomial) returns a polynomial in symbolic form, e.g.

'X^5-19*X^4+79*X^3+146*X^2-1153*X+1222'

Is there a command to convert this symbolic polynomial form to an array as would be returned by Valentin's PCHAR program? Related commands such as PROOT and PCOEF require their arguments as an array.

One could write a program to do the conversion by string processing but it would be messy.