Good call, Acer. Your thoughts have solved my problem. I was told that the custom Maple prompt we were using for output (which produces visible output prior to any Perl touches) is "just Maple, exactly as if you were using the Maple command prompt". But this is incorrect -- our custom Maple prompt is "just Maple" up until the very last step, where the result is run through sprintf("%a\n",...). Since I only use this custom Maple prompt, I never even realized that Maple normally does *not* use the "e" notation, such as in your example:

> Z := 0.00056:
> Z;
                                    0.00056

This surprise led me to realize information had been unintentionally withheld from me, which means I was also unintentionally withholding information from you. Good thing you're brilliant enough to notice those sorts of things, despite having no experience with our esoteric setup whatsoever! Now I know where to fix the problem.

Thank you very much for all your help.

Good call, Acer. Your thoughts have solved my problem. I was told that the custom Maple prompt we were using for output (which produces visible output prior to any Perl touches) is "just Maple, exactly as if you were using the Maple command prompt". But this is incorrect -- our custom Maple prompt is "just Maple" up until the very last step, where the result is run through sprintf("%a\n",...). Since I only use this custom Maple prompt, I never even realized that Maple normally does *not* use the "e" notation, such as in your example:

> Z := 0.00056:
> Z;
                                    0.00056

This surprise led me to realize information had been unintentionally withheld from me, which means I was also unintentionally withholding information from you. Good thing you're brilliant enough to notice those sorts of things, despite having no experience with our esoteric setup whatsoever! Now I know where to fix the problem.

Thank you very much for all your help.

Unfortunately I don't personally know the particulars of the setup, but we can take as an assumption that I'm using Maple's convert() to change the output into a string, if it is somehow important to this question. (In actuality, the setup I have running currently takes Maple output and creates a Perl string from it, but again, I'm not sure where along the way any conversions are made (if at all).)

Let me make clear that I'm not looking for a procedure which, for example, mines away the mantissa and exponent and then recreates the float as I want it expressed -- I can do that on my own, and it's precisely what I'm trying to avoid. I'm simply hoping there exists a function or setting or something which will suppress this "e" notation, and I'm just ignorant of it. I've seen plenty of examples in other mathematics packages for forcing output to be formatted in a certain way -- fingers crossed for this to exist in Maple, too!

The only reason I mentioned the string bit in my original post was to emphasize the facts that 1) I'm not able to work with a Maple GUI for this project, but I am able to call any Maple functions and 2) my output is in plaintext. My apologies if this was misleading.

Unfortunately I don't personally know the particulars of the setup, but we can take as an assumption that I'm using Maple's convert() to change the output into a string, if it is somehow important to this question. (In actuality, the setup I have running currently takes Maple output and creates a Perl string from it, but again, I'm not sure where along the way any conversions are made (if at all).)

Let me make clear that I'm not looking for a procedure which, for example, mines away the mantissa and exponent and then recreates the float as I want it expressed -- I can do that on my own, and it's precisely what I'm trying to avoid. I'm simply hoping there exists a function or setting or something which will suppress this "e" notation, and I'm just ignorant of it. I've seen plenty of examples in other mathematics packages for forcing output to be formatted in a certain way -- fingers crossed for this to exist in Maple, too!

The only reason I mentioned the string bit in my original post was to emphasize the facts that 1) I'm not able to work with a Maple GUI for this project, but I am able to call any Maple functions and 2) my output is in plaintext. My apologies if this was misleading.