Simon Plouffe has started an interesting thread on the usenet newsgroup comp.soft-sys.math.maple (viewable here, for those without good nntp server access).

They are discussing the speed of computation of exp(1.0...

How is it possible to get the following error message

Error, invalid input: DMat:-DSolveSys expects default value for keyword parameter begynd to be of type Vector, but received {}

?

I thought that the default value of a keyword parameter need not match any particular type, in fact so it says in the help page for 'Procedure Parameter Declarations' :

I had some problems using CodeGeneration and Compiler on a particular code.

Partially there are some bugs - and things, which need proper handling (not so obvious in advance, at least for me).
Details with comments are in the attached worksheet (or its pdf version)

Download 102_Some problems using CodeGeneration and Compiler.mws

I came across this poll,

and thought it would be nice to see what software people use here (some people have already said that the don't actually use maple, they only post here to help people).

So far it looks like not many people use Maple, hopefully once more people vote this poll will become more accurate:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~hert3229/

Why are lists limited to 100 elements?  Will it be expanded?

To judge results of functions coded in double precision against precise results (as they may be given by Maple) one has to respect decimal presentations on one side and IEEE on the other side.

For that one can use routines developed by Florent de Dinechin, which are worth to be better known.

Here is a Maple sheet showing how one can do it (looking at the complex valued power function using evalhf versus using MS VC2005 as an example).

After reading the interview with Gaston Gonnet who was one of the original founders of Maple I became  interested when he started to talk about their thoughts of moving to open source.  Don't get me wrong his whole interview was quite interesting.  Then I just happened to stumble across this article http://www.c4ontario.ca/news-room/press-releases/software-wrap-up/view from April 2009, where Tom Lee from maplesoft is on a panel discussing open source software. 

In his last blog post “Watching the Dawn”, Fred Kern comments on the life of an engineer before the realization that symbolic approaches to computing can get you better results faster. The analogy is, of course, prior to this revelation we were in some sense in the dark. I’d like to add my two cents worth as I was indeed one of those engineers lurking in the dark for many years.

Flash back about 20 or so years.  I was a poor graduate student and to feed myself, I began doing small jobs for this new company called Waterloo Maple Software (which eventually became Maplesoft).  Mostly, my work was to develop small applications or demonstrations with an engineering focus.  I remember with great fondness, the look of shock and awe that would come over my engineering colleagues’ faces when I showed them how I computed symbolic matrix products or performed a cumbersome simplification in seconds. For me, it was an obvious thing to do because I had access to the technology and I didn’t know any better. But for them, it seemed like pure voodoo. But in reality, the common themes that I somehow fumbled upon during these early presentations would later reappear in much richer, exciting forms as core themes in the eventual “symbolic sunrise” twenty years later.

I’ve flown across the oceans hundreds of times, but anyone who has done it even once has experienced the beautiful view of a dawn or a sunset.  That is, if you weren’t asleep.

I’ve had the good fortune to witness other dawns and sunsets – the dawn of new technologies, and the sunset of others.  I’m old enough to remember the dawn of ATMs, fax machines, the internet, wireless technology, transistors, personal computers and several other things that are basic to our lives today.  I actually contributed in a small way to at least two of those “dawns”.

The truth is that most technology dawns are more obvious in the “afternoon” – a few years after the dawn.  When it’s happening, it often seems like a complicated and possibly interesting thing, but the full potential impact isn’t always clear (at least to me).

I’m quite sure that I’m witnessing another new dawn today.  It’s the dawn of symbolic computing technology revolutionizing the world of engineering.

There was some recent discussion about Maple's Standard GUI having two parsers. (See here, and its parent.)

I've been accumulating a list of some differences between the parsers of 2D Math and 1D Maple notation, for the same given pasted input.

In particular, I'm interested here in differences...

MaplePrimes is a community where thousands of members share their expertise and knowledge of Maplesoft products, and of math & technical topics in general.  To help nurture the environment, and to maintain a quality resource for MaplePrimes members, we have decided to extend content moderation to the community.

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It appears that once a new version of maple has been released, all refining and polishing up of the previous version stops. 

Are any of the older Maple versions still useful? 

I'm sure they still have their usefulness on older systems that don't have much memory and can't handle the newer versions system requirements.   Besides that, and the renaming of some routines and packages would one ever have the need to go back to an older version?  Let's say for example I have Maple 12, 9.5 and 7 on my machine and I wanted to start a worksheet, would I ever have the need to start one on Maple 7? 

I came across a reference to a Maple package named centermanifold. The reference is: Computation of Center Manifolds, Nov 11, 2000, Robert Corless, Keith Geddes and Xianping Liu.

But I couldn't get my hands on the package, I tried google and email but so far no success, does anyone at mapleprimes know if this package is available somewhere?

Or some very close substitute? thanks!