Introduction

A few words to those who are familiar with other programming languages.

• Maple is a procedural programming language. It also includes a number of functional programming constructs. If you have written programs in Basic, Pascal, Algol, C, Lisp, or Fortran, you should be able to write numerical programs in Maple very quickly.
• Maple is not strongly typed like C and Pascal. No declarations are required. Maple is more like Basic and Lisp in this respect. However types exist. Type checking is done at run time and must be programmed explicitly.
• Maple is interactive and the programming language is interpreted. Maple is not suitable for running numerically intensive programs because of the interpreter overhead. Though it is suitable for high-precision numerical calculations and as a tool for generating numerical codes.

This document is based on Maple version V. Maple development continues. New versions come out every one or two years which contain not only changes to the mathematical capabilities of Maple, but also changes to the programming language and user interface. For this reason, I have tried to steer you away from constructs in the language which are being, or are likely to be removed, and have mentioned some things that will be in the language in future versions of Maple.

The Maple V Language Reference Manual is the main reference for programming in Maple. It is published by Springer-Verlag. The ISBN number is 0-387-87621-3 . Other useful sources of information include the First Leaves: Tutorial Introduction to Maple, also published by Springer-Verlag, and the extensive on-line documentation which is accessible with the ? command in Maple. Part of the reason for writing this document is that some of the important things I have stated here are not mentioned elsewhere, or they are buried in the documentation.

• Evaluation
• Expressions: Sums, Products, Powers, Functions
• Indexed names and Functions
• Statements: Assignment, Conditional, Loops