Extending Maple with compiled routines

Maple (www.maplesoft.com) combines extensive capabilities in symbolic algebra with an interactive environment and graphics capability. With the latest release, Maple 6, you can incorporate your own compiled routines into the Maple interpreter. Maple itself capitalized on this capability to link in routines from the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) library, adding a lot of capability to this commercial product. Maplesoft engineers told me they extensively revamped the internal engine to provide this capability. Having written a system that combined a numerical array-language interpreter and compiled code, and having worked lately on extending the Python interpreter with C++ and Fortran, I was curious to see how a symbolic interpreter could do this.