Re-implementing R in Maxima



On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 9:22 AM, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu>wrote:

> Re: What's missing with bfloats?
>
>
> solve and allroots don't support bfloats.  romberg doesn't support bfloats
>

There is bfallroots.   How would you tell romberg to use bfloats?  The
limits are bfloats?  The tolerance is a bfloat?  Some other way?


> Of course, none of the external math packages (quadpack etc.) support
> bfloats.
>

For all of the special functions that use slatec (including quadpack), I
think the main issue would be the constants that are contained in the
algorithms.   It would be fairly difficult to recompute them to the correct
precision when using bfloats.


>
> That's off the top of my head.  I'm sure there are others.
>
>
Yes, I"m sure there are others, now that you've pointed out some of the
obvious cases.

I also notice that ratepsilon is still 2e-8, even though maxima has been
using double precision for years (decades?) now.

Ray