Thanks for that information, but why is that not in the Maxima manual
or Help document, or if that exists where does one find it ?????????
I was either vaguely aware or suspected all that you wrote, but why
should it be necessary to guess or deduce about these matters when a
manual or Help mechanism exists, in apparently a deficient manner?
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> The e indicator is the normal syntax for floating-point numbers.
> 's' indicates single-precision floating-point and 'd' indicates
> double-precision floating-point. I believe all Maxima implementations
> represent *all* machine floating-point numbers as double-precision, so all
> three are equivalent.
>
> 'b' is Maxima syntax for arbitrary-precision floating point numbers, called
> 'bigfloats' or 'bfloats'. The variable fpprec determines how many decimal
> digits are carried along. Thus:
>
> 1/3b0, fpprec=20;
> => 3.3333333333333333333b-1
>
> 1/3b0, fpprec=30;
> => 3.33333333333333333333333333333b-1
>
> I'll let others address your plotting questions.
>
> -s
>