Most programs will not produce and assign to a large number of global "top-level" names. But it is interesting that the cost associated with such global name assignment is related to the number of entries in libname.

A possible cause of this cost is the need to check whether the name is protected, before assigning.

The following timings were made on 32bit Maple 15 running on Windows 7, on an Intel i7. The set of four timings is...

It may be of interest to this community that the original Maple Project at the University of Waterloo was awarded the ACM SIGSAM Richard Dimick Jenks Memorial Prize in June, at the joint ISSAC/SNC 2011 conference (overlap with FCRC 2011).

See here for the announcement.

The complexplot3d command can color by using (complex) argument for the hue, and compute height z by magnitude. So, when rotated to view the x-y plane straight on, it can provide a nice coloring of the argument of whatever complex-valued expression is being plotted.

Another way to obtain a similar plot is to use densityplot (with appropriate values for its scaletorange option) and apply argument to the expression or function being plotted. For some kinds of complex-valued...

The ability to color a 3D plot using a color function is geared more for functions of x and y only.

But quite often, the surface or pointwise 3D position of the plot is itself being specified as a height z which is a function of x and y. For the plot3d comand, that's pretty much the way it works (whether using an expression or a procedure).

So, of course, the very same rule that...

A Plot Component (on the right below) can act as a kind of 2-dimensional "slider" for inputing values of two parameters at once.

The polar plot (on the left below) makes use of both values.

If you click in the right Plot, and drag around the mouse cursor for a while, then the left Plot will be continuously updated.

Make sure to execute the collapsed code-edit region, to initialize it. (Just click on it, to execute. Or expand, look, and right-click on it.)

Download plotslider1.mw