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.

The program mint, bundled with Maple, is a very useful syntax checker and program analyzer.

As provided, `mint` works best with Maple program source when contained in plaintext files. Inside Maple itself there is a command maplemint which does some of the same tasks as the stand-alone program `mint`. Unfortunately `maplemint` is quite a bit weaker than `mint` is, for quite a selection of procedures. Also, `maplemint` doesn't have the sort of flexible control that `mint` provides through its optional calling parameters.

I had previously posted a Maple language procedure for the purpose of calling out to `mint` while inside Maple (Standard GUI, or other). Here it is below, cleaned up a little. Hopefully it now works better across multiple operating systems, and also provides its optional parameters better.

An attempt at question 2 of the xkcd Velociraptor Math problem (mentioned on this blog post). The parameters and events facilities of dsolve,numeric are handy here.

There is no released Classic interface to accompany the 64 bit version of Maple (12, 13) for the 64 bit Windows XP64 operating system. Personally, I prefer running the Standard over the Classic interface, although sometimes I miss common subexpression display for lengthy symbolic output.
 

Not all objects can be saved to .m and retrieved sucessfully in a restarted or new session. This is the case not only for "escaped" locals, but also for some objects implemented as function calls of a module member.

I was just reminded of an aspect of Maple GUI Components, new to Maple 13, that has sometimes come in very useful to me. It is the ability to refresh a component programatically.

I should explain. The old (and current default) behaviour is for the GUI not to refresh any other components until the current component is finished (ie. returns control).

On some Linux distributions, the default font (Lucida Bright at size 12) for text mode in Maple's Standard GUI doesn't look as good as it might at the default magnification.

Here's a screenshot of Maple 12 and some text in a worksheet (on my very old Fedora Core 2).

I was considering what sorts of "normally coded" things might get broken by the loading of a Maple Library package and the ensuing rebinding of names.

And so I tried this,

> with(RealDomain): # rebinds sin

> convert( cos(x), sin );
                                     sin(2 x)
                                 1/2 --------
                                      sin(x)

I was actually surprised to see that work OK. I was expecting `convert` to object to the second argument, which actually gets passed in as RealDomain:-sin.

The following type of difference in behaviour, due to deterministic ordering of sets as introduced in Maple 12, may affect implementations of some algorithms.

I wonder what virtue there would be in an "assistant" in the Standard GUI to show and allow control of the interface settings.

In the absence of a built-in assistant (or tab in the Tools->Options panels) I wonder whether a simple Maplet would serve.

acer