Symbolic differentiation with respect to first derivative

Is it possible to make a derivative of an equation with respective to the first derivative . Illustration:

syms x(t)
eqn = diff(x) - 2
%diff(eqn,diff(x))

The expected result is 1 [edited after sir Walters answer] . A workaround is using subs() but is there any other straightforward way to achieve the result?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/help/symbolic/functionalderivative.html is the only available tool provided by Mathworks.

However, this is not going to do what you want:

syms x(t); dx = diff(x); eqn = dx - 2;
>> diff(eqn,dx)
Error using sym/diff (line 26)
Arguments, except for the first, must not be symbolic functions.

(which is a misleading error message that I will file a bug about.)

Note that if you would to have

eqn = x - 2
diff(eqn, x)

the result would be 1, not -2 . -2 is constant with respect to x(t) or diff(x,t) so it is going to vanish in the derivative.

It is tempting to use something like https://www.mathworks.com/help/symbolic/odetovectorfield.html to substitute the derivative with a symbol that you can then differentiate with respect to. However, drivatives are not independent of the original function, and you can arrive at wrong answers if you do this. I have posted examples in the past demonstrating that differentiating with one function with respect to another by processes like this give incorrect solutions (but that was a while ago and might be a bit tricky to locate now.) You cannot generally differentiate with respect to a function using normal calculus: you need The Calculus of Variations, which MATLAB does not implement.

[madhan ravi]

Ah my bad it’s 1 , just made a mistake there . Thank you very much for all the explanations sir Walter:) it covered everything what I was hoping for.