In this paper, we present our ongoing work and initial results on the formal
specification and verification of MiniMaple (a substantial subset of Maple with
slight extensions) programs. The main goal of our work is to find behavioral
errors in such programs w.r.t. their specifications by static analysis. This
task is more complex for widely used computer algebra languages like Maple as
these are fundamentally different from classical languages: they support
non-standard types of objects such as symbols, unevaluated expressions and
polynomials and require abstract computer algebraic concepts and objects such
as rings and orderings etc. As a starting point we have defined and formalized
a syntax, semantics, type system and specification language for MiniMaple