Previous: Starting Up MAXIMA Up: Basic Information on Running Maxima Next: On-Line Info for MAXIMA

Floating Point Calculations

The MAXIMA flag numer controls numerical evaluations. Floating point numbers are double precision (64 bit i.e. fpprec set to 16). The MAXIMA computation

(C12) sin(x^2);
					 2
(D12) 				    SIN(X )
(C13) ev(d12,x=%pi/5),numer;
(D13) 			      0.3846089750773245

For extended precision floating-point computations fppreccan be set to a larger number. In this case, the Maxima function bfloat is used to compute with big floats. For example,

(c14) fpprec:40;
(c15) bfloat(sqrt(%pi));