ABSTRACT
Text processing is data processing where the data consist of text. The text may be anything: a novel, a book on computer programming, the text of a computer program, or just phrases, words, or arbitrary characters. Maple is not the most obvious language to choose for writing text processing programs, but it is entirely possible to process text using Maple and text processing is an important aspect of computer programming. Maple is no worse than (say) C for text processing as far as the actual language is concerned, although Maple lacks some of the useful text-processing library functions that are included in the standard C support environment and a Maple program will run much slower than an equivalent C program. Both Maple and C lack the sophisticated pattern matching facilities of a language such as Perl. (It would be a useful programming exercise to implement some of these facilities in Maple.) Software Tools by Kernighan and Plauger [15] provides a good introduction to text processing (and programming in general).
