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anthonyQueen11-Garnet
11-Garnet
May 11, 2024
Question

Mathcad 11.2 (Maple Engine): a comparison

  • May 11, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 1392 views

In another post I asked a feedback about the development of Matchad Prime (MCP) v.10 as compared to the previous versions. 

 

Up to now I kept my Mathcad (MC) 11  - the first "love" in this field of software - despite the problems of running it in the new OSes. Apparently its seems that MCP is not near (for a general math user) after 10 versions to what it was MC 10, i.e. Mathcad 2001i (the preceeding version of MC11). I was also told to give a try to MapleFlow (MF), given the fact that also MC11 hides a maple symbolic engine. So I did in a backup computer with v.2023.3 - the latest.

 

As already observed several features of MC are absent in MF. For instance it does not have a alignment option of formulas, as MC11 does (see picture). Moreover, I did not find a list of functions, that are instead directly accessable in MC11. At the same time, MF shows a feature that I greatly miss in MC 11: a list of assigned variables in the worksheet. I guess also its symbolic engine is much more powerful, overall, than the one in MC11 or in the subsequent versions. Other point that no one seems to care about, but I do: MC11 takes a bit more of 100Mb in my HDD, MF more than 5GB. Ram's use is in a similar proportion.

 

I tested, to begin with, the "easy of use" in symbolic writing. MC11 is quite intuitive on this respect. MF2023 does not accept the same kind of writing, despite both MF and MC share a Maple engine. No doubt, from a MC user, MF needs some extra learning. The picture shows the difference (a red square in MF means a writing error, and "=" in MF is the same of --> in MC):

Mathcad 11 vs MapleFlow 2023.png

 

 

 

    1 reply

    A
    anthonyQueen11-GarnetAuthor
    11-Garnet
    May 12, 2024

    I continued some testing in "easy of use" - one of the strong points of MC. At the following result I could not resist. Probably in MF there is some hidden (and to me unkonwn up to now) commands to make simple Matrix Sum work (even with "i" from 1 to 1), while in MC11, there are no intricacies to get the result, even with 50+ interactions. To be fair, and contrary to what I wrote in the previous post, in MF with "esc" you get a list of functions as a contextual menu. Yet to be shown,  you need to dial the initials of its name first.

    Mathcad 11 vs MapleFlow 2023_B.png

     

    A
    anthonyQueen11-GarnetAuthor
    11-Garnet
    May 12, 2024

    For those interested on how MF fails at such a simple summation (in the case presented there is no even need to take any recursion, being i from 1 to 1) here is what  I found.
    Within the sum brackets one should insert LinearAlgebra[MatrixPower](A, i), since matrix with index exponents are not accepted in MF.

    This is not  a really friendly approach, as compared to MC, which confirms that the latter was - and I hope it still is - a great product.

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