Greetings to all.

I am writing to alert MaplePrimes users to a Maple package that makes an remarkable contribution to combinatorics and really ought to be part of your discrete math / symbolic combinatorics class if you teach one. The combstruct package was developed at INRIA in Paris, France, by the algorithmics research team of P. Flajolet during the mid 1990s. This software package features a parser for grammars involving combinatorial operators such as sequence, set or multiset and it can derive functional equations from the grammar as well as exponential and ordinary generating functions for labeled and unlabeled enumeration. Coefficients of these generating functions can be computed. All of it easy to use and very powerful. If you are doing research on some type of combinatorial structure definitely check with combstruct first.

My purpose in this message is to advise you of the existence of this package and encourage you to use it in your teaching and research. With this in mind I present five applications of the combstruct package. These are very basic efforts that admit improvement that can perhaps serve as an incentive to deploy combstruct nonetheless. Here they are:

• A parity bias for trees
• Number of nodes with even offspring
• Trees with odd degree sequence
• Ordered rooted trees with all nodes having at least two child nodes
• Average depth of a leaf in an ordered binary tree

I hope you enjoy reading these and perhaps you might want to feature combstruct as well, which presented the first complete implementation in a computer algebra system of the symbolic method, sometimes called the folklore theorem of combinatorial enumeration, when it initially appeared.

Best regards,

Marko Riedel.