On 5/24/10, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is an issue with gcl. As the message says, it can't print the
> non-number, which is double-float infinity in this case. You can do:
>
> :lisp (setq si::*print-nans* t)
We should make that the default for GCL.
It's kind of silly to compute something and then refuse to display it.
> to get it to print something, but I'm not sure maxima will really know what
> to do with a double-float infinity.
Maxima just punts to Lisp for floating point arithmetic.
Some of them know what to do with float inf and nan,
some don't know. I suppose in the interest of portability
Maxima should either handle the special values by itself,
or prohibit them. Or we can just continue as we are.
I don't have a strong preference today.
best
Robert Dodier