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

define(h,'orderless',h(1,2)=3); works as I would expect and h(1,2) and h(2,1) evaluate to 3. define(h,'orderless',h(2,1)=3); gives both h(1,2) and h(2,1) evaluating just to h(1,2). I suspect this is a bug since replacing 1,2 by a,b or by b,a it works as I would expect. Is this (another) fundamental bug or have I misunderstood something? I'd be interested in any comments.

I am amazed by the behaviour of the following bit of Maple (from maple 10), boiled down from a student project. Looks very buggish to me, but perhaps I am misunderstanding something. I'd be grateful for any comments. (I edited the first line in response to the comment immediately below _ had used ange brackets that were being interpreted as html.) v:=: B:=[0,0]: for i to 2 do v[1]:=i; v[2]:=i; B[i]:=v; end do: B; [Vector(2, {(1) = 2, (2) = 2}), Vector(2, {(1) = 2, (2) = 2})] Added later in the day: as a colleaugue points out, the problem arises presumably because the assignment B[i]:=v leaves B[i] pinting to v rather than the value of v at that time.

We have Maple 10 ryunning on a large Univerity network of Windows XP machines. Unfortunately Maple can't save changes in options such as to use "Maple input" rather than "2-D input". The reason for this (according to our tech people) is that Maple tries to write to user profiles directly rather than using the API (as it should), and so it is missing our redirection of the profiles. 1) Are other people having this problem? 2) Is the above correct? If so, why are Maple using these hacks and not implimenting things "properly". 3) Is there a fix? I'd be grateful for any info.