Maple V Programming Guide

As a Maple user, you may fall into any number of categories. You may only have used Maple interactively. You may already have written many of your own programs. Perhaps, even more fundamentally, you mayor may not have programmed in another computer language before attempting your first Maple program. Indeed, you may have used Maple for some time without realizing that the same powerful language you regularly use to enter commands is itself a complete programming language. Writing a Maple program can be very simple. It may only involve putting a proc() and an end around a sequence of commands that you use every day. On the other hand, the limits for writing Maple proce dures with various levels of complexity are dependent only on you. Over eighty percent of the thousands of commands in the Maple language are to examine these programs and themselves Maple programs. You are free modify them to suit your needs, or extend them so that Maple can tackle new types of problems. You should be able to write useful Maple pro grams in a few hours, rather than the few days or weeks that it often takes with other languages. This efficiency is partly due to the fact that Maple is interactive; this interaction makes it easier to test and correct programs. Coding in Maple does not require expert programming skills.