Various other commands

There are a few additional Maple commands that are important to master before you are prepared to use Maple to solve real problems. These additional commands are not so much related to the mathematics as they are to let you communicate with Maple and manipulate expressions.

The ? command is very useful to new Maple users. It is used to find information about a command by activating a search through the help database. This makes finding useful information a fast, simple process.

The restart command clears all names and variables and allows the user to start over. It is recommended to include this at the top of the majority of Maple worksheets to ensure that there are not preset values of variables being used from a previous calculation.

: is used to suppress the output from a command. The command still executes, but the output of that command is not displayed in the worksheet. This is useful when there will be lots of output that is not the final result and you are confident there are no errors in your command. In fact, you can execute the command without the : to see the results and then suppress the output before submitting your final result. However, most homework requires the result of each command to be displayed (and printed). So don't suppress the output of commands used to solve homework problems.

% is a symbol that refers to the result of the last command executed in the worksheet. This is useful, but can lead to hard to track errors if you execute statements in any order other than what is listed in the document. It is preferable to name all expressions and refer to them by name. This is the safest and easiest to follow and debug.