Maple's package DiscreteTransforms is a bit skinny, I miss various ones like discrete cosine transforms (at least the most 4 types), sine transform, Hartley transform, z-transform and may be the fractional Fourier transform or symmetric FTs (not sure for the whole herd).

It should be available, if Maple wants to be a numerical tool for technical users (all kinds of engineering I would say): it would not make sense for them to use other libraries, compile and finally combine with Maple, because it does not have it.

Some years ago, before the advent of the Statistics package, a colleague asked for a fast way to generate thousands of normally distributed random numbers in Maple. The suggestion that worked quickest and most easily (using existing, simple Maple Library routines) was to generate random deviates using the usual formula associated with the distribution. But the key was to replace the scalar values (representing the uniformly distributed input) with a whole Matrix of input values....

 

I have two suggestions how the developers of Maple could improve the software

 

1) Improved  capabilities for algebra.

Currently it is difficult to do mathematical manipulation (sometime even simple stuff) with Maple.

In a perfect world I could just right click on an expression and then get all the possible permutations of that expression.

I usually dont use Maple when it comes to manipulating algebraic expressions because I usually end up getting angry.

 

2) Loop protection

If you have a single variable polynomial you must specify the variable in the sort command when using the ascending and descending option.  Ascending or descending will not work without it.  It's obvious you need to express it with more than one variable but for single variables it should not be needed.

As a simple example.   b:=x+x^3+x^2;

Sort(b)  gives x^3+x^2+x and sort(b,ascending) gives the same answer as does Sort(b,descending)

Every now and then someone will post here on Mapleprimes and the code will use an older package such as linalg or stats. Quite often it is clear that the poster is new to Maple. Yet these packages have been superceded with new ones, eg. LinearAlgebra and Statistics.

One obvious question that then arises is: how did this user decide to use the older package?

I just did a google search on

It would be nice to have all the collections of applications on the maplesoft application site on a single dvd or cd.  And every 6 months or so make available the newest added ones. 

What single change in Maple would you want more than any other?

Maybe it's an enhancement, or a functionality change, or a bug fix.

Maple gives different error messages to the same input depending on whether the input is done with Maple notation or 2D Math Input.

My example is to enter the following erroneous input in both Maple notation and 1D math notation:

plot( sin(x, x=0..1 );

Clearly this is missing a right parenthesis after the first x.

Here is how this section of my worksheet copies into MaplePrimes:

Maple's Standard GUI has context-sensitive menus. Those are the menus that appear when one right-clicks on a output (or input, in a Dcoument).

Those context-menus can be customized.

Below is an example which adds a new submenu. The new submenu is populated automatically according to the types of thing found within the object itself.

It's an alternative to a menu-item that already exists, which shows up as "Help on Command". But that existing item only...

Maple 12, Mac OS 10.5 see "invalid character ..." messages! . . How about other platforms?

The pair of (desktop icon) image files Maple12Classic.png and Maple12.png could more sensibly be installed in some location such as the $MAPLE/etc directory.

Having them get installed, as in Maple 12, to $MAPLE/bin is a little strange.

The usual use of bin directories is for executables, and not binaries in general. Eg. some other binary objects such as shared object libraries may be in lib/, and text shell-scripts may also be in bin/. So the fact thet .png files are "binary" isn't any good reason to place them in bin/.

acer

It would be nicer if the nprofile commandline utility had its own script in $MAPLE/bin similar to the maple and xmaple scripts.

That is the place that one usually either looks for Maple executables or appends to one's PATH. A single location makes more sense and is easier.

It would also be nicer if nprofile help-page mentioned something like the exprofile help-page's comment that, "The preferred method for creating the output  file is with writeto() and/or appendto()."

Sometimes I have to write a Maple code compatible to several versions of Maple (typically 9.5 and 10 but sometimes also 11 or VR4) and I am missing a information in Maple help pages - a changelog or, more specifically, a version information. At least, for every particular fuction or package, I am missing the information since which version of Maple it exists (eventually since which version it is obsolete).

I suggest adding descriptions of variable, size, and factors() to the GF help page. Currently, they are not even mentioned there.

Alec

I suggest using spell checker on the help pages.

For example, such thing as

Other commands, such as MTM[vertcat], offer new functionality: vercat provides an easy way to combine arrays.

with both vercat and vertcat in the same sentence in the ?MTM help page should be easily caught.

Alec