Things like this do not seem worth special-casing. Floating-point has
well-understood limitations, and Maxima offers bfloat when you want to
escape (some of) them.
It would be far more valuable in general if we could integrate IEEE
floats into Maxima (in this case, getting a NaN). But that is a bigger
project....
-s
On 2010-05-11, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:
> What should maxima do with float(sin(2^2048))? It currently generates
> an error because 2^2048 is too big to fit in a double float.
>
> We could do better than this by doing argument reduction of 2^2048.
>
> Or the easy way is to tell the user to do float(bfloat(sin(2^2048))).
> Should maxima do that automatically?
>
> Ray
>
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima mailing list
> Maxima at math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
>