Long story, but the computer I was using only had Maple 11 on it, so apparently some of these 'bugs' have been worked out in Maple 12.

But the reason to use Maple for plotting is clear: convenience.  A seamless environment for doing multiple tasks is much more convenient than coercing various tools to 'work together'.  The 'scratchpad' use cases for Maple account for more than 1/4 of the uses (see the Poll!), and for such use, publication quality graphics (or typesetting for that matter) are not necessary.

Long story, but the computer I was using only had Maple 11 on it, so apparently some of these 'bugs' have been worked out in Maple 12.

But the reason to use Maple for plotting is clear: convenience.  A seamless environment for doing multiple tasks is much more convenient than coercing various tools to 'work together'.  The 'scratchpad' use cases for Maple account for more than 1/4 of the uses (see the Poll!), and for such use, publication quality graphics (or typesetting for that matter) are not necessary.

BarChart can be used - but the results are very unsatisfying (horizontal bars with the labels at the end and an axis with irrelevant numerical ticks); ColumnGraph gives an error as the input is non-numeric.  It might be possible to use them still, but the examples are not helping figure out how.

A little bit of Googling has shown me how to do this (easily) in both Excel and OpenOffice's calc though, so maybe I'll use that instead.

BarChart can be used - but the results are very unsatisfying (horizontal bars with the labels at the end and an axis with irrelevant numerical ticks); ColumnGraph gives an error as the input is non-numeric.  It might be possible to use them still, but the examples are not helping figure out how.

A little bit of Googling has shown me how to do this (easily) in both Excel and OpenOffice's calc though, so maybe I'll use that instead.

Somehow this ancient post is now quite broken.  For one, 2+2 shows up as just that, 2+2, rather than the 'expected' 4!  And the MathML shows as MathML rather than being 'displayed'.

Doug's posts are always well-crafted, and usually immensely pedagogical.  He truly uses Maple as a tool for learning and exploration.

As jakubi said, learning first-hand from Doug what needs to be done to make Maple an even more useful tool would be a treat.

Jacques

[Yep, I am a full 3 weeks behind reading Primes, and I am unlikely to catch-up today, just wandering around on a couple of interesting posts]

The explanation here is also simple: invisible times.  `` is the empty name `x` is the name x; so ```x``` is then taken to be the same as `` `x` `` which is indeed ``^2*x.

Part of the issue is that ` is 1-sided, unlike (), [] and {}, so you cannot easily figure out which ` belongs with which other `.  Uniformly choosing the closest-one, while otherwise respecting the language grammar, produces the effects you report here.  There is no clear-cut way of doing this, so this becomes part of the "grammar design". 

This magic table contains some code which 'knows' information about a lot of functions, including ceil and floor.  So while Maple does indeed know something about those functions, the knowledge in this case is buried in limit's internals and not reusable by the rest of the system outside the context where taking limits make sense.

What is going on - the images produces by the <maple> tag have gotten even worse!  Why?

What is going on - the images produces by the <maple> tag have gotten even worse!  Why?

Well spotted - fixed post.  Thanks.

OddEven := L -> [seq([L[],L[(2+(-1)^nops(L))..-1][]][2*i-1],i=1..nops(L))];

OddEven := L -> [seq([L[],L[(2+(-1)^nops(L))..-1][]][2*i-1],i=1..nops(L))];

[sorry, I have fallen behind my postings]

OddEven := L -> [seq([L[],L[2..-1][]][2*i-1],i=1..nops(L))];

[sorry, I have fallen behind my postings]

OddEven := L -> [seq([L[],L[2..-1][]][2*i-1],i=1..nops(L))];