If you are new to Maple you should be aware that the program has
gone thru many revisions. Maple began in 1980. Since then there
have been many improvements. In 1984 Maple 3.3 was released. This
was followed by versions 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3. In 1990 Maple V
was released. Next came
Maple V Release 2, Maple V Release
3, Maple V Release 4, Maple V Release 5. In the year 2000 the
V
was dropped and Maple 6 was released.
In 2001 Maple 7 came out. This year Maple 8 came out.
To some extent all versions of Maple are compatible. However, some major
syntactic changes were made when going from Maple V to Maple 6. But generally
speaking Maple 6, 7 and 8 are pretty similar. Naturally however each new
version has some new features and improvements over previous versions.
For more on the history of Maple up to 1993 go to
http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/SCG/history.html