Essential Maple 7 (PDF)

3 Programming in Maple (p.186-187)

[Lady Fiorinda was] in the theoric of these matters liberally grounded    through daily sage expositions and informations by Doctor Vandermast, who had these four years past been to her for instructor and tutor. To try her paces and put in practice the doctor’s principles and her own most will-o’-the-wisp and unexperimental embroiderings upon them, ready means lay to hand. . .
- E. R. Eddison, The Mezentian Gate, Book VI.


Maple is useful as a collection of "black boxes," but it is more useful still as a very high-level programming language. Since most of the tasks undertaken by Maple are "one-off" calculations (as opposed to "batch" calculations, which require many executions of the same program), it makes sense that Maple is an interpreted, rather than compiled, language. This is true even for the Maple library, because for large problems the cost will be dominated by the manipulation of large objects. Some crucial operations, though, are performed by kernel routines, which are compiled for efficiency.

With the external calling features, new to Maple 6 and improved for Maple 7, it is now possible to "tune" these efficiency tradeoffs more closely for any particular application. With the external calling features, new to Maple 6 and improved for Maple 7, it is now possible to "tune" these efficiency tradeoffs more closely for any particular application.

Maple procedures can be divided loosely into two types: operators, and more general procedures. Procedures and related structures may be bundled together into a module. An operator is meant to imitate a mathematical operator, both in notation (insofar as this is possible in ASCII) and in action. The .rst section of this chapter deals with general procedures and their uses. These can do essentially anything computable. Since Maple is a high-level language, you can express these actions