Subject: How to deal with r^(bfloat(2/3))/r^(2.0/3)
From: Robert Dodier
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:46:20 -0700
On 12/12/07, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> > (%i6) (bfloat(2/3))-(2.0/3);
> > (%o6) -.19073b-6
> However, with default settings, the error should be < 1.0e-16, and I
> cannot reproduce your result with any settings. In fact, on my system
> (Maxima 5.13.0 on GCL 2.6.8), this returns 0.0b0.
I seem to recall that bigfloat conversion was tweaked recently.
I'd have to look in the cvs log and/or email archive to be sure.
With a recent build, I get (bfloat(2/3))-(2.0/3) => 4.163336342344337b-17
which seems appropriate.
best
Robert