I've finally tracked down a problem I was having to a behavior in Maple I find, possibly, understandable, but need to figure out how to prevent. Specifically, in expressions of the form x^y, where both x and y may sometimes be zero, the behavior I require is for Maple to evaluate y first so x^0=1 whatever the value of x is. (Maple does evaulate 0^0=1 itself, I note.)
An example where this sort of thing comes up is in an expression like
sum(x^k,k=0..5)