In many kinds of calculations, you may find yourself typing the same input to
Mathematica over and over again. You can save yourself a lot of typing by defining a
function that contains your input commands.
The functions you define in
Mathematica are essentially procedures that execute the commands you give. You can have several steps in your procedures, separated by semicolons.
When you write procedures in
Mathematica, it is usually a good idea to make variables you use inside the procedures
local, so that they do not interfere with things outside the procedures. You can do this by setting up your procedures as
modules, in which you give a list of variables to be treated as local.
