A call to randpoly generates a random polynomial in vars. It is useful for generating test problems for debugging, testing and demonstration purposes.  Several options can be specified, determining the form of the polynomial.  This allows for quite general expressions with certain properties.

The first argument vars specifies the variables in which the polynomial is to be generated.  If vars is a single variable, a univariate polynomial in that variable will be generated.  If vars is a list or set of variables, then a multivariate polynomial will be generated.

The possible options (and their default values) are:

The terms option is intended for specifying the number of terms in sparse polynomials, where the numbers of terms is often significantly smaller than the maximum number of possible terms.  The terms option will be overridden by the degree option.  A call randpoly(x, terms=7) will return a polynomial with six terms, since the default degree is five. If you want a dense polynomial, simply use the dense option.

randpoly([x], coeffs = proc() randpoly(y) end proc);