I want to parse a large listlist with strings and floats

As an example
a:=[["he","45",123,76,"1.0",4],["know","4",9,34,"3.2",5]]

I want to parse a but it requires all entries to be strings

map2(map,parse,a) 
Error, invalid input: parse expects its 1st argument, st, to be of type string, but received 123

So my workaround was to convert all entries to a string.  How do I do that?  and how can I parse without having to...

Just wondering how many undocumented commands exist in Maple?  HTTP is only one I know about.  I believe documentation for it exists only in a help page on an older version of Maple, Maple 9 I think (but removed in newer versions), however it's functionality is still active in the newer versions. 

Any others?

The other day when I had a chance to have a look at Maple 14, I noticed the font looked much nicer.  So I had a look at previous versions and found out that the same font in Maple 14 compared to 13 is different?  Why is that? 

Both fonts were done at default (graphic user interface) - 12pt. Times New Roman and C text (just text mode)  In Maple 13 the font looks stick like, and in Maple 14 it looks more textbook like.  If they are different...

How do I split the data up into seperate lists? 

A simple example
a:=[class,23,45,74,34,25,76,class,55,67,78,34,65,12,23,45,64,23,class,12,13,15,class,99,98,97,59, ... ]

So I want to seperate the data out like this
a[1]:=[[2..7]]
a[2]:=[[9..18]]
a[3]:=[[20..22]]
...etc

So I'm not sure how to get maple to skip the word class that seperates the data and store them into seperate lists.

a:=Array(1..2,1..2,[[2,3],[4,5]])

writedata("c:/test.txt",a)

Error, invalid input: writedata expects its 2nd argument, Data, to be of type {set, hfarray, list, matrix, array(1), list(list)}, but received Array(1..2, 1..2, {(1, 1) = 2, (1, 2) = 3, (2, 1) = 4, (2, 2) = 5})

Since array is the deprecated version of Array you would think Array would work using writedata in Maple 12

But it does work with array.  Since I only have access to Maple...