[134] in mathematical software users group
[MIT Only] Maple V Release 3 on Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Reid M. Pinchback)
Fri May 20 16:46:30 1994
To: msug@MIT.EDU
Reply-To: msug@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 20 May 94 16:45:30 EDT
From: "Reid M. Pinchback" <reidmp@MIT.EDU>
This applies to MIT users of the Athena computing environment only.
Maple V Release 3, patchlevel 1, is now ready for use on Athenized Sun
(Solaris), RS/6000 (AIX) and DECstation (Ultrix) platforms. I've been
testing this for awhile, and it is quite stable with numerous
bugfixes, so this will become the default version of Maple at the end
of May. At the moment, to use the software just do:
athena% add maple.vr3 (which mounts on /mit/maple)
athena% maple
Once MVR3 becomes the default version, you will simply need to do:
athena% add maple
athena% maple
and the locker containing the older version (Maple V Release 2) will
then be renamed to maple.vr2, and the Dash entries will also be
updated to invoke the new version.
Potentially confusing feature changes for MVR3 are relatively minor.
Probably the most important user-visible change to note is that the
formats of the ".m" files and worksheet files have changed.
Worksheets are automatically converted by MVR3, but if you only have
".m" files without the original ASCII source, then you need to use the
"m2src" utility provided to get back the ASCII. One other important
thing to note is that this version will be slightly slower to start up
than was the case for MVR2. This is a result of how the library files
are organized and the resulting impact on AFS file caching.
Good improvements to note are the following:
- Sun keybindings for arrow keys are fixed.
- it is now possible to generate latex output for entire Maple worksheets.
- there is a collection of sample worksheets in /mit/maple/examples/
- there are some user-interface improvements in the design of the toolbars
for the worksheet and plotting windows
- some ability to control the fonts used for text shown in plots
A summary of changes is available in the online help. Just use the
Maple command:
?updates,v5.3
-----------
Reid M. Pinchback
Faculty Liaison
Academic Computing Services, MIT
