Review of Maple V Release 5

T latest release of Maple V has had little time to be installed on many University teaching networks, least of all my own! So this review is mainly a report on what the improvements and the new features may have the potential to offer for those contemplating making the upgrade from Release 4, or as a change of teaching software for those who use one of its competitors. For certain comparative purposes, I installed the package on two similarly endowed PCs, a Pentium 133 and a Pentium 166 (with MMX), both with 32 Mb of RAM, but running under Win 95 and Win 3.1, respectively. The software was sent to me on two CDs, although it can be supplied on diskettes if required. The full installation takes up about 40 Mb of hard disk space, of which about 10 Mb is occupied by the optional Share Library. I was subsequently alerted to the existence of the patch-level 1 upgrade. This can be freely downloaded from the Maple website (http://www.maplesoft.com/ patchec1.html) as a 5.6 Mb self-extracting file. The manuals supplied in the box are the Maple V5 Learning Guide and the Maple V5 Programming Guide. The rather essential Maple Handbook, distributed with Maple V4, has apparently not been upgraded by its author Darren Redfern. Speaking personally, I do like to have a hard copy of the full set of commands and their syntax.