JacquesC

Recently posted onto Wolfram's Blog is a set of 10 tips for how to write fast Mathematica code.  It is a very amusing read -- go read it now, because below I am going to make some comments on it, assuming that you have read it.

1. Use floating-point numbers if you can, and use them early.
   Basically: if you're using Mathematica as a...

If you want to know what ::uneval does (it's an advanced option for procedure parameters), you can look at the uneval section of ?parameter_modifiers.  It is useful when you want to write a function which works on raw user input rather than on evaluated input.  This is quite tricky, and fraught with danger, and should only be used as a last resort;  but sometimes it really is rather handy.

This is a follow-up to a rather old posting about maple.vim.  There is now a maplevim project on google code to helpfully get the community to work on upgrading maple.vim a bit more frequently. 

Right now there is a shipping version of maple.vim checked-in, as well as a set of 'pieces' (in the pieces sub-directory...

Here is a challenge: reproduce this Mathematica notebook in Maple - without cheating, naturally.

I think I'm jealous.  But I'd love to be shown wrong and have someone do up a Maple 14 document which does everything that that notebook does, only better.

Users with high enough reputation on MathOverflow get increasing amounts of power on the site.  Generally, it works rather well. 

Why are upvotes and downvotes shown separately?  If a question/post is disliked by a lot of people, it should show up as 'negative' (like it does on MathOverflow).  And it should affect people's reputation too!  People who ask sufficiently bad questions (and enough of them) should receive this feedback from the community.  It's what makes the community self-policing!

I suggest that the suggestions for tags that are currently listed be turned off.  This is because they are generally really bad and off-topic (and probably swallow all sorts of CPU time needlessly...).  I much prefer the auto-complete feature in *Overflow for tags (as well as a good list of common ones).

And why does it always suggest to me the tag academic?

The questions do not list 'MaplePrimes' as a possible topic.  And the Post does have (under MaplePrimes Suggestion), as well as talking about "Have a problem with MaplePrimes?" which sure sounds like a question!  So I don't get what the intended difference is.  It made a certain amount of sense in the previous version of Primes, but now that's *Overflow-like, I'm not sure if the distinction makes much sense anymore.

I used to really enjoy reading mapleprimes and answer questions.  It was fun.  There were challenging questions, and some rather interesting design discussions.

And then I got bored.  I am not totally sure exactly why.  In some ways, I think the density of challenging questions went down.  Well, that's perhaps not quite right either -- the density of new (challenging) questions went down.

Try to typeset

normal(1/((omega^Omega/a-1/2)[a,sqrt(2)][1/2]-(zeta+iota)[-y][-1,1]+(xi+Xi)[alpha[1/2]]));

in your favourite version of Maple. What's the "best" way to typeset this in LaTeX so that it looks 'best'? The renderer here on primes gives:-1/(-(omega^Omega/a-1/2)[a,2^(1/2)][1/2]+(zeta+iota)[-y][-1,1]-(xi+Xi)[alpha[1/2]])

It's fairly ugly, but at least the baseline alignments seem to be ok, even though the fonts are way too small (and fuzzy too).

Mike Kucera and I are happy to announce the availability of MapleMIX, a partial evaluator for Maple. Partial evaluation (PE) is a program transformation technique that uses a subset of the inputs to a program to generate a specialized version of the program that will then accept the rest of the inputs. With PE it is possible to write algorithms in a highly general and abstracted form, and then automatically extract optimized versions of the algorithm specialized for certain inputs.

Some time ago, I had a blog post about a compendium of inequalities,  Some people took a look and found problems in that paper.  So I took the time to track down the author and point him to the mapleprimes page.

He got back to me some time later, thanking me for pointing out the errors.  But in the same email, he pointed me to 2 other papers, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0707.2098 and http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0707.2584 which contain (interesting?) conjectures which seem amenable to Maple exploration. I meant to look at these myself, but it has now become clear that I won't for quite some time yet. Perhaps these will pique the curiosity of some MaplePrimes member.

Could MaplePrimes be made a little more robust?  It seems that roughly once a month I get a Drupal error all weekend instead of access to MaplePrimes.  I frequently have more time on the weekend to answer some questions, so it is the community that loses when the site is down... 

This has now happened frequently enough that clearly there is a systemic problem in the infrastructure, and it would be nice to know that it is being investigated and fixed.

It is not every day that a venerable and wide-ranging standard such as IEEE-754 gets an update!  IEEE 754 dates from 1985 (that was the year it was approved, the actual work started years before).  Wikipedia has a nice summary of the changes.

Of course now inquiring minds want to know: will Maple 13 by IEEE-754-2008 compliant? [For all I know, it might already be most of the way there, with only minor tweaks necessary].

GMP is now deeply integrated into Maple - which I consider to be a good thing.  But it appears that compiler writers are doing a bad job (see the first paragraph on GMP's home page)  In other words, unless you carefully make sure that you have compile GMP properly, it is entirely possible that you end up with a buggy library.  Very scary stuff.