Maple 9 Learning Guide - Maplesoft

2.5 Basic Types of Maple Objects2.5 Basic Types of Maple Objects • 21This section examines basic types of Maple objects, including expressionsequences, lists, sets, arrays, tables, and strings. These ideas are essentialto the discussion in the rest of this book. Also, the following conceptsin Maple are introduced.• Concatenation operator• Square bracket usage• Curly braces usage• Mapping• Colon (:) for suppressing output• Double quotation mark usageTypes Expressions belong to a class or group that share common properities.The classes and groups are known as types. For a complete list oftypes in Maple, refer to the ?type help page.Expression SequencesThe basic Maple data structure is the expression sequence. This is agroup of Maple expressions separated by commas.> 1, 2, 3, 4;1, 2, 3, 4> x, y, z, w;x, y, z, wExpression sequences are neither lists nor sets. They are a distinct datastructure within Maple and have their own properties.• Expression sequences preserve the order and repetition of their elements.Items stay in the order in which you enter them. If you enteran element twice, both copies remain.• Sequences are often used to build more sophisticated objects throughsuch operations as concatenation.