Integrate question

[parisse]

(10-19-2017 01:26 PM)DrD Wrote:  I understand that the value stored in (var a) gets rewritten, but that -1/48 term makes comparing results troublesome.

1. How can a student learn to feel confident with this outcome?
2. How can real world automation applications reliably use this result? (In other words, an automatic process of some sort, that dynamically uses a computed result for control purposes).

DrD, before discussing supposed bugs, you should probably revise your math courses about integration. Antiderivatives are defined up to a constant and this constant vanishes when you integrate on an interval. This is not specific to maths by the way, potentials in physics are also defined up to a constant (well it's the same but in dimension not necessarily 1).