You are, I think, misunderstanding what Maple does,
confusing the number of digits displayed with the
number of digits internally computed.
Anything
done in Maple can be simulated, but since you don't
seem to understand what Maple does, all you would have
is a facility that you don't understand in maxima!
If you want to display floating point numbers in
different formats, learn about common lisp's format
function, and access it from maxima.
e.g. a lisp function
(defun $paulmyersdisplay(x) (format t "~%~f" x))
where you can put anything you want instead of ~f format.
If you want variable precision arithmetic, look at bfloat.
RJF