On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Jay Belanger wrote:
> Since it is Maxima giving the result, I'd say it has everything to do
> with Maxima. Here, it has to do with the way that Maxima handles
> floats.
> It may be worth noting that both Axiom and my pocket calculator give
> the correct answer to 3*1.4^2.
I don't understand your statement: why do you think that the result given
by your calculator is "correct", and the one given by maxima is
"incorrect"? Any floating-point result is supposed to be inexact, because
of rounding errors (except floating-point numbers with denominators of the
form 2^n, for small n). Therefore, two results which differ by a quantity
of order of rounding errors are equally correct.
Andrey