34.1 Introduction to Rules and Patterns

This section describes user-defined pattern matching and simplification rules. There are two groups of functions which implement somewhat different pattern matching schemes. In one group are tellsimp, tellsimpafter, defmatch, defrule, apply1, applyb1, and apply2. In the other group are let and letsimp. Both schemes define patterns in terms of pattern variables declared by matchdeclare.

Pattern-matching rules defined by tellsimp and tellsimpafter are applied automatically by the Maxima simplifier. Rules defined by defmatch, defrule, and let are applied by an explicit function call.

There are additional mechanisms for rules applied to polynomials by tellrat, and for commutative and noncommutative algebra in affine package.