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I've just read Formatting results of a polynomial long division with great interest. For my teaching purposes it would be great to enable the code given in that post to treat polynomial division with coefficients from a finite field. Is there a simple way to do that?

Code:

Column@{WolframAlpha["polynomial long division (y^3-6y+20)/(y-3)",{{"QuotientAndRemainder", 1}, "Content"}, PodStates -> {"QuotientAndRemainder__Step-by-step solution"}], WolframAlpha["polynomial long division (y^3-6y+20)/(y-3)", {{"QuotientAndRemainder", 2}, "Content"}, PodStates -> {"QuotientAndRemainder__Step-by-step solution"}]}
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It seems, there is no easy solution. I wrote a ruby script that fulfills the task. It produces command line and latex output. It can be downloaded from https://github.com/demogorgi/polynomialLongDivision

Example:

Arguments are dividend, divisor, charakteristic of the finite field, variable symbol

>ruby pd.rb "3,0,0,1,1" "4,0,3" 5 x

yields (among other things):

  (   1x⁴ + 1x³             + 3  ) : (   3x²       + 4  ) =    2x² + 2x  + 4
- (   1x⁴       + 3x² )
-------------------------------------------------------------
            1x³ + 2x²
      - (   1x³       + 3x )
-------------------------------------------------------------
                  2x² + 2x  + 3
            - (   2x²       + 1 )
-------------------------------------------------------------
                        2x  + 2
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  • $\begingroup$ Can you please show how to call this from within the Wolfram Language & Mathematica? Thanks! $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 5, 2022 at 20:11
  • $\begingroup$ You can use RunProcess[$SystemShell, "StandardOutput", "ruby pd.rb '3,0,0,1,1' '4,0,3' 5 x"] But you have to comment line 260 and other code lines that produce undesired output. If it doesn't work use StandardError instead of StandardOutput. ExternalEvaluate might also be an option if you really want to run the code from within Mathematica. $\endgroup$
    – Uwe Gotzes
    Commented Feb 7, 2022 at 10:16

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