MEL offers a method of speeding up complicated or repetitive tasks, as well as allowing users to redistribute a specific set of commands to others that may find it useful.
It provides some memory management and dynamic array-allocation, and offers direct access to functions specific to Maya.
It is primarily a language meant to journal the Maya session,[citation needed] so it lacks many advanced features such as associative arrays.
Since nodes form the actual computational core of Maya using a more robust readily apparent programming method would be a very inefficient approach.
The tools designed using MEL scripts generally come under the following categories: This is an example of a script which copies a selected object through its path: Maya also offers an expression language that is a super-set of MEL, and results in nodes that are executed as part of Maya's dependency graph.