In 1976 Risch proposed a scheme for finding the integrals of forms built up out of transcendental functions that viewed general functions as rational forms in a suitable differential field and represented the polynomial parts of those forms in a distributed rather than recursive way. By using a data representation where all variables were (more or less) equally important this new method seemed to side-step some of the complications that had appeared in his previous scheme where various side-constraints had to be propagated between the levels present in a tower of separate extensions of differential fields, otherwise seen as levels in recursive datastructures.