On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Jorge Calvo <Jorge.Calvo at avemaria.edu>wrote:
> Hello:
>
> I just started learning Maxima and am enjoying it quite a bit. In a
> previous post to this list, it was mentioned that entering
>
> > 2^3^4^5;
>
> gives what appears to be an overflow error. My question is what is the
> largest integer that Maxima can handle. Information on the actual
> representation of integers would also be appreciated.
>
>
The largest integer that maxima can handle is limited by the largest
integer the underlying Lisp can represent. This in turn is limited by the
memory available to Lisp. For a 32-bit lsp, this is probably on the order
of at most 1GB or so. For a 64-bit lisp, the limit is probably higher but
still limited by the amount of physical memory you have, say 16GB(?).
And I think most lisps represent integers as, essentially, a contiguous
vector of 32 (or 64)-bit words in memory. But maxima doesn't care how
they're represented.
2^3^4^5 is about 2^(3.73e488), so that's unlikely to fit on any machine
ever.
Ray