The main difference is that MathOverflow (and StackOverflow) have reputation systems that are heavily geared towards answering questions. General chat, sharing of ideas, and speculation are penalised and actively discouraged.

Incidentally the parent website, Stackoverflow, also has a small but active community answering Maple questions. See stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/maple You will probably recognise some MaplePrimes contributors.

David Clayworth GUI Developer

If you couldn't read my reply, have a look at the help page for "pointplot". The second example shows how to plot multiple points in multiple colours.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

If you couldn't read my reply, have a look at the help page for "pointplot". The second example shows how to plot multiple points in multiple colours.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Absolutely right, Robert. That method is certainly better than nothing.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Absolutely right, Robert. That method is certainly better than nothing.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

It's obviously your right not a report a bug if you don't feel like it. It's also your right to write about bugs you have found on public forums if that's what you want. If you actually want Maple to be improved (rather than just talking about it) I would recommend reporting bugs you find. It's much harder for the "people working at Maplesoft" to fix bugs if we are not told about them.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Alec I assure you that bugs are not prioritized based on who reports them. If you report it it will be given the same priority as if anyone else does. Of course if you don't report it, we're not going to know to fix it.

Reporting a bug does not guarantee it will be fixed of course, and if we are unable to reproduce it then we won't be able to do anything with it.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Some versions of Maple were shipped with a bug that meant the "noborder" option was not recognised. It is fixed in later versions.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Alec

I just loaded up both your plot.ps and your plot.pdf. I can't see any of the issues you are talking about in the ps plot. The axes look the same thickness to me, and a look at the file will show that the postscript used to draw them is virtually identical. I don't see any variation in thickness of the line, or it's colour, but if I did I would expect that to be due to the antialiasing code trying to smooth out the line. If so then that's your viewer, not the underlying code. A quick look at the underlying postscript will show you that the curve is drawn consistently throughout its length, and the postscript to draw the two axes is identical apart from the location. (lines 156 and 202 of your file)

I do see the difference in the axis thickness in the PDF, but again given the identicality of the axes in the postscript I have to put that down to the ps/pdf converter, or the PDF viewer. My guess is that it's antialiasing again. Some viewers will antialias a horizontal or vertical line that is not exactly placed on a pixel boundary, making it seem thickner; some will shift the line so it is on a pixel boundary. Again it's your viewer's choice, not the postscript. Postscript can't know where the pixel boundaries will lie ahead of time.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

P.S. You can of course use postscript directly to draw x squared, but I wouldn't recommend it for anything more complicated. In fact it takes fifty lines of postscript to draw the axes, without the labels. And do you really want to be converting plot coordinates to postscript coordinates in your head, for fifty line segments, without a mistake?

He probably did. It is true though that some problems of the class that Maple is designed to solve can't be solved in 10 mins (or 24 hours).

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

He probably did. It is true though that some problems of the class that Maple is designed to solve can't be solved in 10 mins (or 24 hours).

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Alec

You write "SAGE developers are mathematicians, so Calculus in SAGE may be more mathematically correct than in Maple." Are you trying to say that Maple developers are not mathematicians?

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

The reason why copying plots from Standard to Classic is a problem is that Maple copies the plot structures; these get rendered using the Classic renderer, which isn't as good as the Standard.

If you want a plot in Classic that looks like standard, try copying the plot from Standard to an image tool (MS Paint works fine). Then copy the resulting image to Classic. The results are still not quite as good because some ani-aliasing is lost in the copy to the image, but it will usually be better than a Classic-generated plot.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

Alec, are you aware that you appear to have prevented anyone from Maplesoft from reading (not just writing) your MapleWIki? Was that intentional?

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer

It's not a question of deprecated features. Sun are very good about continuing to support those. There are, however, small differences in the behaviour of Java from one release to the next, as there are in any complex computer system, despite the best efforts of the programmers to eliminate them. I should say that in the big picture those differences are very minor, but Maple only needs to make use of one of them to cause a potential problem.

In answer to your second question, Maple 12 shipped with Java 6 Update 3 on Windows. Sun's most recent supported version is Java 6 update 7, and the most recent beta Java 6 update 10. Neither of these will differ very much from update 3. The beta may have bugs of its own, of course - that's why it's a beta. On the Mac Maple ships with Java 5, and there are good reasons for that. Mac implementations usually lag a little behind Windows.

David Clayworth Maplesoft GUI Developer