The commands that you type in and the Maple results are shown here in a way that is similar to what you see on the screen. Most of the time you will be using Maple as a calculator. You can also write programs in Maple, but usually you will be using the tool expecting an immediate response. In the second, we input , and Maple computes its value before printing the output. Even if you don't get a syntax error, Maple will not treat the expression as you expect.
Maple works primarily with whole numbers or fractions.
This will be the case of any other assignment operation you do in Maple, as we discuss below. However, in the second case, the presence of 1.0 indicates to Maple the terms in this computation are approximate, and gives you a decimal expansion of the result. Maple also divides polynomials. Here the command you execute has a syntax which is a little bit more complicated. 1.6 Further discussion on this is given in section 4.2 .