Some Common Row Operations Errors Error Messages

The Row Operations Package needs to be loaded. Maple is willing to work with function calls it has no recipe for explicitly calculating. In this case it just echoes start_ge since it has not loaded the definition of this function from the row operations package.

Maple Release 4 uses backquotes, not apostrophes, for strings. The error message below comes from Maple having noticed a clon in a syntactically wrong position.

A successful load of the Row Operations Package

(More output appears...)

Arithmetic Errors

You may see a display like this in which it appears that the computer has made an arithmetic error.

What really transpired was more likely something like

where perhaps the first ar() above was erased or edited in the worksheet.

This is because the row operations package uses some global variables which are initialized by the start_ge() command. When making corrections, one needs to re-execute all lines from the start_ge() on down to get the correction properly interpreted. (This just means putting your mouse somewhere and hitting execute a bunch of times ...)

Back Substitution Errors

The matrix must be in echelon (upper triangular) form before back substitution is invoked.

Here first swapping rows 1 and 2 makes the matrix appropriately triangular.

For matrices with floating point entries, small roundoff errors prevent ordinary back substitution from being used.

Use the rounded form instead. By default rounding is to 4 or 5 decimals.

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Last Update: September 12, 1998