As a domain name has been used since early 1992, as the following entry shows:

#N      .maplesoft.on.ca
#S      .CA Domain;
#O      Waterloo Maple Software Inc.
#C      Jacques Carette
#E      jjcar...@maplesoft.on.ca
#T      +1 519 747 2373
#P      Waterloo Maple Software inc., 160 Columbia Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3L3
#L      43 30 N / 80 30 W city
#R      Automatically generated from a .CA domain registration form
#W      regis...@cs.toronto.edu (UUCP Liaison); Sun Nov 21 01:31:04 -0500 1993
#
#       maplesoft.on.ca is a For-Profit Corporation
#
#       Produces and distributes a computer algebra
#       system called Maple.
#
#       received: Mon, 24 Feb 1992 19:00:00 -0500
#       approved: Mon, 2 Mar 1992 19:00:00 -0500
#       modified: Tue, 8 Jun 1993 20:00:00 -0400
#
# Internet forwarders:
internet-ca-gws         <.maplesoft.on.ca>(DIRECT), <maplesoft.on.ca>(DIRECT)
# UUCP forwarders:
wmsical         <.maplesoft.on.ca>(LOCAL), # by jjcar...@maplesoft.on.ca
                <maplesoft.on.ca>(LOCAL)
#uunet.ca       <.maplesoft.on.ca>(DIRECT), # by postmas...@uunet.ca
#               <maplesoft.on.ca>(DIRECT)

As a corporate name, it really did not start to take over from Waterloo Maple Software, then Waterloo Maple Inc., until roughly 2003, yes. The corporate name was indeed adopted from the domain name! Even within Maplesoft itself, very few people know who is actually responsible for coming up with the name that the company goes under. I think Dave Linder just figured it out though.

It is nice to see that Maple has improved in its core over 16 years.  Using 'assume' instead of assuming, I wonder how far back that improvement was actually made?

That probably gives it away...

That is a correct answer to question a.  Of course watmath.uwaterloo.edu doesn't exist anymore, it is now math.waterloo.ca.  The IBM AIX machine that as called wmsical is also long long gone - but it served as Maplesoft's main mail server for many years.

You are using * rather than . as the product.  So things do not work.  Plus, you should just use Transpose(X,'conjugate'=false).  Or do assume(a>0,b>0,c>0) at the top [as they are all lengths].  Then it seems to work for me.

The Wikipedia entry for the determinental form is indeed missing a - (minus) sign.  The MathWorld entry seems correct.

Plus it is absolutely horrible style to want to access locals from 'outside'!  Learn Maple's way -- it seems you are trying to adopt OO style in Maple.  It is possible, but the end results are rarely as good as what you get if you program in Maple 'properly'.  There are tons and tons of examples of good Maple code in Primes as well as on the Application Center (and in the Advanced Programming manual).

You have the case where there are bug reports on Maple Primes (which are visible to all), but not filed at all.  So the whole world knows that there are these bugs in Maple, and yet they won't get fixed!

It makes sense for us over-eager primes denizens to discuss a bug first, before it gets filed.  That way the report will be of a higher quality.  But the current system discourages that.  The discussion will happen anyway though, the part that might get dropped is the filing part.  [The discussion happens because of curiosity; filing is 'work'].

I meant "scooping up", that was a typo (that I can no longer fix, it is now there for posterity).

How on earth is a mere mortal supposed to come up with that map[evalhf] ?  I thought myself fairly Maple knowledgeable, and yet I would never have thought of using that.  Ever.  Plus, isn't it LinearAlgebra:-Map's job to do this efficiently???  The help page for LinearAlgebra[Map] makes no mention that sometimes using map would be better/faster.

When did map[evalhf] appear?  Maple 10.  Great, so I go re-re-read the updates for Maple 10.  No hint whatsoever (other than this exists) that this is massiverly faster!  It is in the 'language changes' section, but not in the 'efficiency' section of the What's New.

What's my point?  The point is that if you expect Maple users to really benefit from your hard work, then you have to document it properly.

Speaking of which, the help page for map:

1. Does not have any examples of map[evalhf] or map[inplace]
2. Does not document that map[evalhf,inplace] would work, in fact the way it is written, I would never have guessed that it does.

Has someone gathered up all these improvements and sent them to the author of ncrunch?  This seems like a worthwhile endeavour, in fact worthwhile enough for a corporate type to do it, rather than have an 'outsider' do it.  I am sure that particular review has sold a lot of Mathematica and may well have sunk some Maple sales.

It has now been just over a month since this feature has been broken, and a month since it was 'promised' to be fixed.

It seems that the 'sooping up' of bugs from primes has stopped (now that we have the not-so-convenient Submit SCR option), so if no one reports it, it might not get fixed! 

However, note that solve(expr > -infinty) and solve({expr > -infinity}, select(type, indets(expr), name)) will both solve these kinds of problems but often with rather different answers.  The issue is that completely different methods of representation of the answer are used depending on the form of the call to solve!  So the way that one calls solve can have a big effect on the quality of the result.

However, note that solve(expr > -infinty) and solve({expr > -infinity}, select(type, indets(expr), name)) will both solve these kinds of problems but often with rather different answers.  The issue is that completely different methods of representation of the answer are used depending on the form of the call to solve!  So the way that one calls solve can have a big effect on the quality of the result.