Hybrid Intervals and Symbolic Block Matrices

Structured matrices with symbolic sizes appear frequently in the literature, especially in the description of algorithms for linear algebra. Recent work has treated these symbolic structured matrices themselves as computational objects, showing how to add matrices with blocks of different symbolic sizes in a general way while avoiding a combinatorial explosion of cases. The present article introduces the concept of hybrid intervals, in which points may have negative multiplicity. Various operations on hybrid intervals have compact and elegant formulations that do not require cases to handle different orders of the end points. This makes them useful to represent symbolic block matrix structures and to express arithmetic on symbolic block matrices compactly. We use these ideas to formulate symbolic block matrix addition and multiplication in a compact and uniform way.