Playing with mpc

I wanted to play with a few mpc-style examples early to shake out the interface.  it's pretty satisfying (albeit slow).  here are a bunch of small fixes, nips and tucks, and updated interfaces to support those tests.
I agree completely.  So does most of the world:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PolynomialOrder.html
But unfortunately, the mathworks doesn't use that convention.  E.g. http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/unmkpp.html