Thanks for the information. I didn't know that fsin/fcos only really work on numbers with magnitude less than about 2^63. What lead me to this
experiment was the statement on the Julia Language page about numerical accuracy (second sentence on http://julialang.org/). I suppose Maxima's
numerical sine, cosine, and ... could look for out for binary64 inputs outside +/- 2^63.
--bw
>I suspect that the intel fsin (fcos?) instruction is not used. Any
>number above 2^63 (~ 1.8d19) is too large for that instruction and I
>think it just returns 0. (I think.)
>Ray