Do you think that it's possible for Maple to ever be free software? I
suppose I should emphasise that this is "free as in freedom",
regardless of whether Maplesoft decides to keep charging money for its
use or not. Me, I don't see it happening in the near future, but I
harbour hope that it could happen for the following reasons:

1) Other success stories of free software, such as the Firefox
browser.

2) Maple, unlike the other leading brand, was built in a purely
academic environment by a community of mathematicians and
scientists who understand the need for free and open collaboration

I'm curious. How do people write large-scale programming projects in Maple? I'm interested in both the interface they use for said writing, plus the style. For example, I would like to have an editor that does syntax highlighting, indents, and balances brackets for me. Is there such a thing? Second, what is the preferred style to do these things? I used to do it by having a huge file where several procedures were defined in it. I would load this file with read(). How about OOP abilities in Maple? Mathematicians think OOPly. I think you can declare new datatypes (remind me how), but is there a good way to go as far and declare objects?

The exponential function behaves a little strange sometimes. This happens in Maple 9. It thinks that 0^0 is 1. I'm actually in agreement with that, although I've seen many a mathemtician argue that it should really be undefined. De gustibus non est disputandum. But it's strange that it think that 0^(1+I) is 0 but 0^I gives a divide-by-zero error, without mentioning that the division by zero occurs somewhere in a call to ln(x). It's something stupid, but a potential source of mystifying bugs in user code. Some CASes, such as Maxima, are smart enough to have a specific error for 0^z for complex z. Still others return NaN.