Maple 401

So you have used Maple as a glorified calculator (Maple 101), then wrote a few 1 liners (Maple 201), and even a few larger procedures (Maple 301), where you were both amazed and horrified by 'op'. But when you get serious about programming in Maple, even for not-so-large procedures, what are the fundamental parts of the system that you should know?

Other pages in this book talk about particular features. This one is instead a simple list of those Maple commands and concepts you need to know to be able to call yourself a Master Maple Programmer.

Concepts you need to understand:

• structured types (see ?type,structured)
• DAGs versus trees
• hash tables
• expression sequences (and why they are both useful and dangerous)
• rtables and indexing functions
• evaluation rules (one level, last-name-eval, special rules)
• higher-order functions
• lexical scoping
• environment variables (known as fluid variables in LISP)
• argument processing
• attributes
• why you should never use 'whattype'
• why you should be wary of 'with'
• why 'has' and 'hastype' can kill efficiency
• options Cache, remember, system, builtin, inlne, etc
• what all the quotes mean
• the difference between evaluation and automatic simplification

Commands you need to know:

• indets
• map, zip and seq
• member, select, remove, selectremove
• `if`
• unapply
• the 'in' operator
• 2-argument eval
• procname, args, nargs, and their friends
• frontend, freeze, thaw
• maptype
• depends
• use, uses and bind
• kernelopts and interface
• typematch
• subsop
• unames, anames
• LibraryTools, march
• $define, $include, $ifdef and other pre-processor macros
• system, ssystem, process
• evalindets and subsindets
• ToInert and FromInert
• call_external
• dismantle, disassemble, pointto, addressof