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The Top Ten Maple Errors

Robert Israel's picture
Posted on 2008-01-25 14:06 By Robert Israel (Maple Rating 4 1554)
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I've made up a worksheet of the Top Ten Maple Errors, containing some of the common mistakes I often see newcomers to Maple commit (especially in the setting of my Introduction to Mathematical Computing class). I hope you will find it useful in trying to avoid those mistakes. Of course this is only a personal list, and not exhaustive. Please feel free to argue the merits of other items that should be included in the list.

Here is the link:

View 4541_topten.mw on MapleNet or Download 4541_topten.mw
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Comments

JacquesC's picture

Wonderful

Comment on 2008-01-25 14:42 from JacquesC (Maple Rating 4 1699)

This is useful in at least two ways:
1. for new users, so they can learn from other's common mistakes
2. for developers, so that they can fix the underlying issue or at least find ways to mitigate the problem.

It would be a very serious usability improvement to Maple if every one of those issues had some 'mitigation strategy' implemented. I have some ideas of how I would deal with most of those issues myself, but perhaps the best thing to do is to not limit developers' imagination on possible improvements by prematurely making suggestions. But I seriously think that this could be a real feather in Maplesoft's cap as well as a great marketing opportunity, especially as most of the competitors have a reputation for being rather disdainful of their actual users, if these things were addressed.

gkokovidis's picture

The Top Ten Maple Errors

Comment on 2008-01-27 13:20 from gkokovidis (Maple Rating 4 700)

Greetings. From my own experience here at Mapleprimes, I see new users using lower case "p" to represent "pi" instead of using "Pi". I don't believe this warrants it's own line in the top 10, but it might want to be combined with item 10:

The exponential function is exp, and π is written as Pi.

Regards,
Georgios Kokovidis
Dräger Medical

Robert Israel's picture

Pi versus pi

Comment on 2008-01-27 22:08 from Robert Israel (Maple Rating 4 1554)

Yes, this should rate a mention: I'll put it in the "Spelling counts" section.

Doug Meade's picture

add and sum and MaplePrimes FAQ

Comment on 2008-02-07 13:31 from Doug Meade (Maple Rating 4 739)

Does anyone have a "Ten More Maple Errors" list?

If so, I propose including confusion between sum and add. This topic has come up several times on MaplePrimes, most recently (today) in the forum titled sum(...) doesn't seem to like values from a Matrix, why?.

If I could search MaplePrimes without destroying this partial post, I would search for other instances of this on MaplePrimes.

Instead of Top Ten lists, would it be more appropriate to start a FAQ on the student side of MaplePrimes? I could create a book page, but how many new users would think to look at a "book page" for a FAQ? It deserves more prominent location. This, I believe, requires some administrative intervention.

Doug

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Douglas B. Meade
Math, USC, Columbia, SC 29208  E-mail: mailto:meade@math.sc.edu       
Phone:  (803) 777-6183         URL:    http://www.math.sc.edu/~meade/

I found it.

Comment on 2008-02-08 12:48 from dahllama (1)

I'm a first time user of mapleprimes and this is the second thing I looked at.  So it's not too obscure and it is very helpful.  I find Maple is very picky and this top ten list is very helpful.  Thanks.

Great!

Comment on 2008-04-03 07:12 from Chris Roung (Maple Rating 2 111)

Thanks

The list reminds me of what I had to do wayyy back when debugging programs in basic.  Looking for mispelled words, missing brackets..  etc..

All in all thanks for the list. 

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