The order in which expressions evaluate in Maple is something that occasionally causes even advanced users to make syntax errors.

I recently saw a single line of Maple code that provided a good example of a command not evaluating in the order the user desired.

The command in question (after calling with(plots):) was

animate(display, [arrow(<cos(t), sin(t)>)], t = 0 .. 2*Pi)

This resulted in the error:

Error, (in plots/arrow) invalid input: plottools:-arrow expects its 3rd argument, pv, to be of type {Vector, list, vector, complexcons, realcons}, but received 0.5000000000e-1*(cos(t)^2+sin(t)^2)^(1/2)
 

This error indicates that the issue in the animation is the arrow command

arrow(<cos(t), sin(t)>)

on its own, the above command would give the same error. However, the animate command takes values of t from 0 to 2*Pi and substitutes them in, so at first glance, you wouldn't expect the same error to occur.

What is happening is that the command 

arrow(<cos(t), sin(t)>)

in the animate expression is evaluating fully, BEFORE the call to animate is happening. This is due to Maple's automatic simplification (since if this expression contained large expressions, or the values were calculated from other function calls, that could be simplified down, you'd want that to happen first to prevent unneeded calculation time at each step).

So the question is how do we stop it evaluating ahead of time since that isn't what we want to happen in this case?

In order to do this we can use uneval quotes (the single quotes on the keyboard - not to be confused with the backticks). 

animate(display, ['arrow'(<cos(t), sin(t)>)], t = 0 .. 2*Pi)

By surrounding the arrow function call in the uneval quotes, the evaluation is delayed by a level, allowing the animate call to happen first so that each value of t is then substituted before the arrow command is called.

Maple_Evaluation_Order_Example.mw