This explanation of the pen and paper idea makes perfect sense to me. Thanks for your comments. I always enjoy reading your input within this newsgroup.

Below is a link to a pretty nice virtual Flash style slide rule from the University of Virginia. It shows spiraling logarithms, and can be used to do multiplication and find roots. As with the one you mentioned, it zooms - right-clicking mouse on flash app after first activating it with any mouse click, brings up a menu to zoom and other features. Once zoomed, clicking the left-mouse on it, allows it to be moved around so you can see the various areas of the slide rule.     link to slide rule Below is a link to the mother site that has links to the slide rule as well as many other very nice flash apps (which can also be downloaded to mac or pc) including things such as integral and differential calculus.     another link I think these are very good learning tools, and I will probably do another entry in my blog concerning such things.

Although I'm relatively new (or should I say "renewed") to mathematics, and even taking into consideration that I'm a programmer working with computers and computing software everday, I agree about the "old ways". The problem with many of the new ways of doing things, at least as related to learning or comprehension, is that there is just so much available, so fast, presented in such a way that the actual comprehension and retainability factor suffer. The answer to just about anything these days is usually nothing more than a "google search" away. I think kids, and even to some degree adults, blindly suffer from such convenience. I must apologize, but you completely lose me when you refer to the pen and paper way of math being more efficient than computing - even with consideration of the ideas I've presented further up. You do mention "by a trained mathematician/scientist/engineer/etc" (I'm sure you know that I am not) which I guess carries a great deal of significance in this regard. I should perhaps mention again, that I'm all for new technology. I couldn't have even begun to learn the math I've learned as quickly as I have without maple and the availability of the research resources now available, but also as mentioned, I think we need more of a combination of the old and new to improve comprehension and retainability.

I would never have come up with that - thanks!

I would never have come up with that - thanks!

- rather than what I'd consider a bug worth doing much with. As someone else pointed out, it can be done as easily using the "fopen" and other "fxxx" functions rather than this "really, really, really, old" function. What do you and others think about this - with that in mind? I frequently go between the classic style and the other when one doesn't seem to be doing something quite right, which is of course the way I found out about this particular behavior. I'd guess that maple support monitors this forum and have already made a note of this issue?

- rather than what I'd consider a bug worth doing much with. As someone else pointed out, it can be done as easily using the "fopen" and other "fxxx" functions rather than this "really, really, really, old" function. What do you and others think about this - with that in mind? I frequently go between the classic style and the other when one doesn't seem to be doing something quite right, which is of course the way I found out about this particular behavior. I'd guess that maple support monitors this forum and have already made a note of this issue?

- it writes the entire output, as it seems it should, when maple 11 "classic worksheet" is used.

- it writes the entire output, as it seems it should, when maple 11 "classic worksheet" is used.

what I was thinking and what I wrote wasn't quite the same. I was thinking: mySet := {a, r, 2, w, 5} for i to nops(mySet) do   if whattype(op(mySet[i])) = integer then   print(i); print(mySet[i]); break: end if end do but keep in mind the set is going to be "reordered" with the first integer, first in this case. However, your idea does look better. edited: except, I wonder why I get the wrong results with the better method - as if the "break" isn't working:

what I was thinking and what I wrote wasn't quite the same. I was thinking: mySet := {a, r, 2, w, 5} for i to nops(mySet) do   if whattype(op(mySet[i])) = integer then   print(i); print(mySet[i]); break: end if end do but keep in mind the set is going to be "reordered" with the first integer, first in this case. However, your idea does look better. edited: except, I wonder why I get the wrong results with the better method - as if the "break" isn't working:

... and the results were the same. However, it does write the entire output correctly if I write it to the terminal.

... and the results were the same. However, it does write the entire output correctly if I write it to the terminal.

That worked fine and is the method I've used in the past, but I wanted to give the other method a try. No matter what I do with elision the results are the same for this situation.

That worked fine and is the method I've used in the past, but I wanted to give the other method a try. No matter what I do with elision the results are the same for this situation.