Maple’s Code Generation makes it possible to translate your Maple code to various other programming languages including C, Python, and several others. In Maple 2015, we added a new Code Generation target to one of my other personal favourite languages, R. R is a programming language designed for statistical computing and graphics, so no code translation from Maple to R would be complete without attempting to translate as many commands as possible from Maple’s Statistics package. 

Translating code from one language to another is tricky business. Maple 2015 represented the first time that any Code Generation target language added the ability to translate commands from the Statistics package. With R, we found that many common statistics commands had almost a one-to-one mapping, such as Statistics:-Mean = mean, but several others were much more complicated, including several commands for dealing with probability functions that did not have direct mappings due to differences in how the systems handle symbolic probability functions.

A list of statistics commands that can be translated from Maple to R can be found here.

In addition to assisting me recall the correct syntax in R, having worked with CodeGeneration[R] for several months now, I find that one of my most common uses for Maple’s code generation to R is simply to pass data between the systems. A simple example:

 CodeGeneration:-R( LinearAlgebra:-RandomMatrix( 5, 2 ) );

translates to the following in R:

 cg <- matrix(c(-4,27,8,69,99,29,44,92,-31,67),nrow=5,ncol=2)

To see a couple more short examples, here’s a short video that I recorded on Code Generation to R:

A little known fact about Code Generation is that the translation files can be viewed in from the “samples” directory in your Maple install directory. Similar to many of Maple’s packages, you can view all of the source code that Code Generation uses for its translations. For example, you can view the translations for the commands that I mentioned above from the “FunctionTable.mm” file inside of your “%MapleInstallDir%/ samples/CodeGeneration/R” directory.

Should you have any feedback on this translation, or any other, please feel free to contact us. We’re also on the hunt for our next code generation targets, so let us know what other languages you would like to see added as Code Generation targets.