In my latest blog post, I used both the cite tag and the blockquote tag, to see if they did anything different. They do not. Worse, neither does what they are supposed to do, which is to indent what I post, so that it stands out. Why? Another issue seems to be that, according to the W3C, you can't have raw text in a blockquote, you are suppose to have enclosing tags (like 'p' for example), otherwise what you get isn't valid. So why does the button generate known invalid html? It's one thing for Microsoft to flaunt standards, but...

I am going to post this rant here on my primes blog instead of polluting some other post (like a book entry say) with all sorts of tangential opinionated stuff. The book entries should, over time, become canonical. The most useful stuff might even make it back (with proper attributions!) into product documentation. Right, so what's this rant about? Efficiency. I know all about that, you think to yourself. So this guys' going to go off and rant about how Maple is slow, show some examples that make his point, and so on. Bzzt, wrong. Ok, so Maple isn't the fastest thing ever, but it is generally fast enough. And when it isn't fast enough in some area where it is clearly behind, wait a couple of years (ok, sometimes 5, but I am patient), and voila, it's fixed. And the same holds for memory usage (though there one has to be even more patient). OK, so if it's not the product efficiency that he wants to rant about, what is it? People efficiency. Yes, I mean my time. The time it takes me to get my job done. I do a fair amount of work in Maple. In fact, I spend hours and hours using Maple, and minutes and minutes (when it's not fractions of seconds) doing computations. So when my tools slow me down, that makes a real difference to me. Like others, this is why I am interested in better development tools for Maple. And why many of us get upset when some features like copy and paste don't work quite right. This is the fundamental reason why some of the misnamed ``usability'' features irk me so. Let's take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about usability:

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

So, take the procedure d := proc (n) options operator, arrow; piecewise(n = 0, 1, `mod`(n, 2) = 1, 2, `mod`(n, 4) = 2, 4, `mod`(n, 8) = 4, 8, `mod`(n, 16) = 8, 16, 32) end proc I tried to use unapply, but it doesn't work at all and gives strange results.. it appears to evaluate the mod beforehand. So, just evaluting d(n) above works fine > l := [seq(d(n), n = 0 .. 16)]; l := [1, 2, 4, 2, 8, 2, 4, 2, 16, 2, 4, 2, 8, 2, 4, 2, 32] However, simplify(d(n)) destroys the function. Also, prod(d(n),n=0..m) returns the wrong values, mul(d(n),n=0..5) works for a finite value such as 5, but does not work symbolically... what gives, why is maple behaving so badly with the mod operator? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The frontend command is a bit tricky. The basic idea is that it replaces expressions in the arguments to a procedure with names, evaluates the procedure with the replaced arguments, then back-substitutes the expressions for the the names in the final result. The first argument passed to frontend is the procedure that is to be evaluated. The second argument is a list containing the arguments to be passed to the procedure. Remaining arguments are optional, we'll get to those in a second.

I had problems with interputing an LaTeX enumeration and continuing it after that. I finally found the solution:

 \begin{enumerate}
   \item ...
   \item ...
   \item \label{it:ob:last}
 \end{enumerate}
 ...
 \begin{enumerate}\setcounter{enumi}{\ref{it:ob:last}}
   \item ...
   \item ...
 \end{enumerate}

thank you to some web sites:

• \jeff{krimmel}

Hi, I am having trouble with the list L:=["2", "abcde"]. I want to get L[1]/4=.5. But L[1] is not a number. How can I convert that? Thanks.

Because my ISP no longer offers home pages, I'm putting the source to maplev-mode here.

maplev-mode is an Emacs major mode for developing Maple code. Its features include:

• font-lock (highlighting) of Maple keywords
• automatic indentation
• syntax checking (via Mint)
• online Maple help
• online display of Maple procedures
• imenu support
• auto-fill support

It works properly with NTEmacs on a Windows machine and with GNU Emacs on a Linux box. It has been tested with GNU Emacs 21.2. It is supposed to work with Xemacs but the testing done with Xemacs has been minimal. The manual is badly out of date.

The current version supports Maple 11 and previous releases of Maple.

I use a dark background, but the maplev-mode can be configured to use a light background. Clicking on the highlighted "on line 13" message in the mint buffer moves the point to that location in the source buffer. Download 84_maplev.zip
View file details

Ref: Kahan (Jan 2007): How Futile are Mindless Assessments of Roundoff in Floating-Point Computation ?

I wanted to know, how Maple behaves on the example given in \2475 of that working paper (where other

systems are considered, mostly Matlab) and thought it might be of interest here in the forum.

> restart; Digits:=16; interface(version);

( 1+ c*10^(n+1) ) / ( 1+ c*10^(n) ): 'limit(%,n=infinity)': '%'=%;

                                        (n + 1)
                                1 + c 10
                      lim       --------------- = 10
                 n -> infinity             n
                                   1 + c 10

However if c = 0 then ...

I have a string in the form ss:="abcd # efg # hijk, lm_r, stuv_k": Is it possible now to write it as [ [abcd], [efg], [hijk, lm_r, stuv_k] ]: Thanx, Kharal

Staff, Will you put an index, in a screen tip, on the forum and blogs buttons? Each screen tip could have links to the most recent 30 posts and one link to all past 30th place. marvinrayburns.com
searchme!
Marvin Ray Burns

Hello, I have a question about Mathematical Expression Component in document. I tried to use it in my maple document and of course I looked at the help about it. There is a discription about another component, I think. The reason of it is that the dialog of component property is different in a help and in a document. I do not know why. I try to use it in Maple 10.06. The following figures show the situation. Of course, problem of this component is not only in different property dialog but also in functionality. Figure from help Figure from document Problem with this component is described also in the document here. Thank you. Vladimir

Scientific Computing recently posted their thoughts on the usefulness of scientific calculators. They also had an interview with a representative of Texas Instruments. When the rep was asked the question of "why would I still use a calculator now that computers are so cheap?"

The final explanation, and the only one that Scientific Computing was satisfied with was that for a calculator, "you can take it into an exam, but most exam systems do not allow you to bring a computer in."

For myself, I haven't touched a calculator in quite a while. For simple problems, I will just use Windows Calculator, or Google. And of course, for anything else, I use Maple.

If you want JordanForm to give the matrix Q that Jordanises the Matrix A then the Help pages tell you to use JordanForm(A, output='Q'); Unfortunately this doesn't work inside a procedure that has Q as a local variable: proc(A) local C; JordanForm(A, output='C'); end proc: generates an error on execution. I'm not sure whether this is a bug although it is surely a poor state of affairs. I don't understand why the syntax has been set so that the value of the option is the global name C - is there some possible advantage to it? . Surely it would avoid all such problems if all options and option values (of this sort) were either reserved words or strings. So then the syntax would be

hi there, The "Maple Advanced programing guide" was produced using a special version of Maple that reads and updates latex files, where can I get such a version? ANYONE KNOWS?