On 7/2/08, Alec Mihailovs <alec@mihailovs.com> wrote:
I started a wiki 2 weeks ago at http://mapleadvisor.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/StartingPage
Originally it was planned to be a Maple wiki (even if I am not especially interested in Maple myself), but it could be much wider than that - including Mathematica wiki, SAGE wiki, and math-fun wiki, for example. Everybody can edit everything.
I added jsMath ( http://mapleadvisor.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/JsMath ) there, so LaTeX formulas are displayed and printed normally (without using pictures). Also, maple input can be displayed nicely (red and bold) through <<mi(some maple input)>>, etc.
Alec Mihailovs
Sounds a good idea, and the site looks nice; but it doesn't quite seem to be quite ready for ordinary mortals (e.g., me!) to contribute to at this stage. I had toyed the idea of airing the following moan there, but decided in the end to unload it on hapless math-funners instead. I wrote a little Maple procedure. [It enumerates permutations of a bag/multiset by (as nearly as feasible) adjacent transpositions, in constant amortised time, and I was quite pleased with it --- though that's neither here nor there.] Nothing very sophisticated: just using very basic features that might easily be ported to or from traditional mainstream languages, say Java or C++. But it seemed to run rather slowly under Maple 9; so to speed things up a little, and to improve its portability, I decided to try using a feature I had previously ignored: specifying the types of function arguments, results, and local variables. Now the compiler knows everything will be integers, 1-D arrays of integers, etc, and I can sit back and watch my test run --- if not quite like the proverbial shirt off a shovel --- at least slightly less like syrup off a spoon. Or maybe not. With types specified, it doesn't actually run any faster. It doesn't run at the same speed. Or even a bit more leisure(li)ly. It actually takes 7x longer to run the same test. That's right, execution is SEVEN times slower with typing than without. For crying out loud! Fred Lunnon (spluttering apoplectically)