ABC of Maple

End of a command

Since Maple allows a command to be written in several lines, a single < enter > usually does not terminate a command (there are exceptions). In order to tell Maple that you have typed a complete command, use either a semicolon (;) or a colon (:) followed by an < enter >. A semicolon shows the result, while a colon omits the unwanted intermediate result.

Previous result

Use a double quote (") for the result of the last command to avoid typing a tedious expression. Two double quotes ("") stand for the next-to-last result, and so on.

On-line help

Partly because the syntax of a command may change in different versions of Maple, it is important to use on-line help. On some platforms there is a help menu. If there is no help menu, and you want to find help about index (or other topic), you can use either help(index); or ?index. Try ?DEtools.

Quit Maple

To terminate a Maple session, you may type quit.

Pi, I and exp(1)

Maple is case-sensitive. So, Pi means 3.14159... but pi or PI does not. The letter I represents square root of -1. The base of natural logarithm is exp(1). Note that in new versions of Maple, E is no longer exp(1), and e is never used for exp(1).