Maple comes equipped with several such packages already, including plots, a package of drawing words, linalg - a very useful package of vector and matrix manipulation words, combinat - a package of words from combinatorics, and networks - a graph theory package. If you develop some words to work on a specialized class of problems, these can be put into a package of words for easy access between worksheets. After awhile, it becomes very useful to be able to add new words to the vocabulary. The existing vocabulary is large enough to carry out the solution to many problems. Initially, there will be little need to do this, except to define functions. What this means is that you can define additional words and add them to the vocabulary. The rest, and there are several, are found in the the plots package, a sort of specialized vocabulary of words which is loaded separately. Two of the plotting words most often used, plot and plot3d, are part of the regular Maple vocabulary. These drawings can be animated (ie displayed in sequence) to study change. There are also a number of plotting words, which are used to draw graphs of functions of one or two variables, curves and surfaces. There is a large vocabulary of Maple words, such as factor, simplify, and expand which are used to 'symbolically manipulate' expressions in the manner you are used to doing with pencil and paper. That means that it is built to work with algebraic expressions and draw pictures. It is a symbolic and graphical manipulator: If the command is terminated with a semicolon (colon), the output is displayed (not displayed). The result of performing the procedure on the input is naturally called the 'output' of the word. That stuff is usually called the 'input' of the word. These are names of procedures which have been defined for performing the action (sometimes) suggested by the name on the stuff enclosed in parentheses just after the word. The strings factor and expand are called Maple 'words'. Tells Maple to do a sequence of three things: add 2 and 5, factor the quadratic, and expand the binomial. A Maple command is simply a string of characters ending in a semicolon ' ' or colon ':'. That means that you can type in commands and execute them, just like in the languages Basic and Logo. Maple has at least four properties which make it very useful in problem solving. You may be using an earlier release on a different platform, but most of what is in this document is still relevant. The particular version of Maple that we are using as we describe it is Maple V, Release 4, running either in Windows 3.1 on DOS or Windows 95. Here we intend to provide you with just enough information about the Maple language to give a headstart at using it productively in the problem solving process.
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