A new version of Plouffe's Inverter was announced by its author today in the usenet group comp.soft-sys.math.maple . That usenet posting gave this link to maple code for the inverter.

It also said this, "As usual, I would like to mention that this program is FREE and can be distributed at will, I just wish that the source is mentioned. Simon Plouffe"

The maple code at that link makes use of Maple's `system` routine to make calls to the underlying operating system when the Maple user runs it. It also contains calls to routines in Maple's `Sockets` package, so that the user's machine will talk to and exchange information with a remote host. It appears that the remote host will serve out data needed for the inversion attempt. I might have enough Maple acumen to distinguish between safe `system` and `Socket` calls and ones which might do harm or pass on private information. But I wonder, how easily can the average Maple user make such assessment, if at all?

Online access to the inverter is available here. It isn't clear to me whether this is using the same Maple code or some other engine to access the data.

Can anyone describe here the relationship, if there is one, between Plouffe's Inverter and Maple's `identify` function? It would be interesting to learn of both their respective functionalities and history of development.

acer