Scot Gould

Scot Gould

512 Reputation

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10 years, 47 days
Upland, California, United States
Dr. Scot Gould is a professor of physics in the W.M. Keck Science Department of Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, Scripps colleges - members of The Claremont Colleges in California. He was involved in the early development of the atomic force microscope. His research has included numerous studies and experiments making us of scanning probe microscopes, particularly those which involved natural fibers such as spider silk. More recently, he was involved in developing and sustaining AISS, a full-year multi-unit non-traditional interdisciplinary undergraduate science education course which integrated topics from biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science. His current interest is integrating computational topics into the physics curriculum. He teaches the use of the computer algebraic and numerical system Maple to assist students in modeling and visualizing physical, and biological, systems. His Dirac-notation based quantum mechanics course is taught solely through Maple. An avid baseball fan, during his spare time, Dr. Gould is traveling, particularly to locations where he can bicycle on smooth, traffic-free roads, visit beaches and/or mountains, and enjoy good food and drink.

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These are questions asked by Scot Gould

I would like to know if there is a difference in the definition of the following words to describe a collection of code in Maple.  Specifically, is there a difference between an internal command, an internal procedure and an internal function?  Or are the folks who wrote Help using the three words interchangeably?  

For example, Help describes "restart" as a command.  That seems reasonable.  It also describes "evalf" as a command. 

Sin, cos and tan are described as functions.  That also appears to be reasonable.  "eval" and "convert" are also labeled as functions. 

However, "unassign" is a procedure as is "animate".  I could understand that since one might assume there is nothing returned. And yet one can assign an animation to a variable/name.

Section 1.4 of the Programming Guide discusses Maple Library Commands under the subheading of "procedures".  However, section 3.15 discusses "function types" which with section 3.8 implies these collections of code might be viewed as functions. (And then there is the function operator of a procedure.) 

I'm trying to compartmentalize the Maple language, but maybe I should not. My inclination is to call everything for which one uses a functional call (section 3.8) as a procedure.  Any assistance would be appreciated.

On virtually any webpage is a mixture of images and text. I can go to the page, select all contents, copy the contents into an Excel spreadsheet, save the spreadsheet file and then use the ExcelTools:-Import function to read the file into a DataFrame. At that point, I can work with the data.   All the text on the webpage, even if it is embedded in some HTML command, is copied as text into the spreadsheet which eventually can be read as text by Maple.

My quesiton is, what is the method for me to bypass Excel and import the webpage directly into Maple, striped of the HTML code? Can someone point me to an example? (The only examples I have seen use the Sockets package, but I thought this mode has been superceded with Import.)

Before I put in a change request to make LinearAlgebra:-Equal the "is" of matrix/vector options, I wonder is there something else I should be doing. 

LinearAlgebra_Equal.mw

I wish to write 2D output strings in various colors. Normally I use printf, though I'm willing to hear other suggestions.

An optimal procedure would one where I pass it the string, and a ColorName color such as "DodgerBlue" or "xkcd blue", but I'm happy if it means passing my own hex code.  Thanks.

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