Advanced Programming Guide

216 • Chapter 6: Programming with Maple Graphics• Programming with Plot Data Structures• Programming with the plottools Packages• Vector Field Plots• Generating Grids of Points• Animation• Programming with Color6.1 Basic Plot FunctionsThis section illustrates:• Basic workings of the graphics procedures in Maple• Properties that are common to all Maple plotting commands• Plotting Maple operators or functions versus formula expressions• Setting of optional informationSeveral Maple graphics procedures take mathematical expressions astheir input. Examples of such commands include plot, plot3d, animate,animate3d, and complexplot. All these commands allow the input tobe in one of two forms: formulæ or functions. The former consists ofexpressions such as x 2 y − y 3 + 1 or 3 sin(x) sin(y) + x, both formulæin the variables x and y. If p and q are functions with two arguments,p + q is an example of a function expression. The graphics proceduresuse the way you specify the domain information to determine if the inputis a function expression or a formula in a specified set of variables. Forexample, the following command generates a three-dimensional plot ofthe surface which sin(x) sin(y) defines. This formula is in terms of x andy.> plot3d( sin(x) * sin(y), x=0..4*Pi, y=-2*Pi..2*Pi );