RE: [Aimmath-developers] changes

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Chris Sangwin wrote:
> As far as I can tell, functions from the package StringTools are
> not widely used in AIM.  Neil has already suggested using
> `Util\Percentsubs`(...) instead of StringTools[FormatMessage](...)
> The only other occurrences I can find are of
> StringTools[SubstituteAll]  Can we do away with StringTools
> altogether?  Is there any other reason why we need to upgrade to
> Maple 7?

Hmm! I had no idea that StringTools was as recent as that. I introduced
two further usages (of StringTools:-RegSub) in Aim.mpl and Make.mpl.
This regular expression tool provided by StringTools made it possible
do what I wanted in a slick one-liner ... I could rewrite it, but it
would end up much longer.

I tend to agree with Ken. There seem to be a lot of packages that were
new in Maple 7, that make coding of AIM questions slicker and easier.
It would be a shame to have to use more primitive tools just to ensure
backward compatibility with Maple 6. If we can, let's standardise and promise
backward compatibility to Maple 7 and try to fix AIM also for versions
up to Maple 9 (we have Maple 8 here ... Maple 9 is apparently available
within the university, but we haven't got it yet). 

  Regards,
  Greg