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A first session

To run xcas ,

You should see a new window with a menubar on the top (the main menubar), a session menubar just below, a large space for this session, and at the bottom the status line, and a few buttons. The cursor should be in the first level, that is in the white space at the right of the number 1 just below the session menubar (otherwise click in this whitespace). Type 30! then hit the return key. You should see the answer and a new white space (with a number 2 at the left) ready for another entry. Try a few more operations, e.g. type 1/3+1/6 and hit return, plot(sin(x)), etc.

You should now have a session with a few numbered pairs of input/answers, each pair is named a level. The levels created so far are all commandline (a commandline is where you type a command following the computer algebra system syntax). Inside xcas , there are other kind of levels, the most important being comments, programs, geometry (2-d or 3-d) and spreadsheet levels.

The most frequently editing operations are

Online help may be accessed using the main menubar Help->Index (short help) and Help->Manuals (long help currently available in French only). If you know a function name, you can also type a part of it and hit the tabulation key (at the left of the Q key on a qwerty keyboard) or the ? key.

You can save your work using the Save button or the session menubar (not the main menubar). Other disk and printing operations are also accessed in the session menubar.

The software configuration parameters are grouped in three sections: cas (computer algebra system), geo (geometry and graphics), general (everything else). The main menubar Configuration item will help you modify the configuration.

There are four kinds of buttons at the bottom of the Xcas window :

In the next sections, we will explain in more details the capabilities of the xcas interface: online help, the different kinds of levels, the management of sessions and the configuration.


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Next: Online help Up: An introduction to the Previous: An introduction to the
giac documentation written by Bernard Parisse