On top of all the serious problems in producing questions for Maple TA, we have to contend with silly bugs like this: $a=0; $d=0; $b=$a+$d; $b is given the value -0. This looks ugly and may cause confusion if it's used in a question. I've got round this by setting $b=int($a+$d). Is there some reason why -0 is a valid result for 0+0, or is this just sloppy programming?

I'd like to have a question which gives information about a circle, and asks students to enter the correct equation. I don't mind whether the equation is in the form (x-a)^2+(y-b)^2=r^2, or the expanded-out version. Here are some ways I've tried to do this, and why I'm not happy with them!

I'm seeing some curious behaviour when I use maple to produce MathML for my TA questions. What I want to do is generate the first few terms of a sequence, followed by "...". I've managed to achieve this in Maple, but it's the conversion to MathML that is causing trouble. I've pasted the code below, showing what I'm trying to do. Maple TA code: $W1=maple("printf(MathML:-ExportPresentation( [seq('ln'(2*3^i),i=0..3),`...`] ))");

Hi, Having got to grips with the basics of Maple TA, I'm now getting fussy over details! I've been authoring using LaTeX, and I've hit a problem with plotting. I have put the following code in the question text: \drawMaplePlot*[300][300]{ plot( sin(x), x=-3.5..3.5,-1..1,tickmarks=[[-Pi=-Pi,0=0,Pi=Pi],[1,0,-1]] ) } but the tickmarks command doesn't seem to work properly. Where I expect to see Pi and -Pi labelled on the axes using the actual pi symbol, I just get the text: