On 2012-11-23, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> As Jaime says, the problem is that 1000! is too large to be represented as
> a floating-point number. In some implementations, float(1000!) returns a
> NaN value, which Maxima isn't prepared to handle.
Actually it's a bug in GCL: GCL computes a non-numeric (inf or nan)
value successfully, but then it cannot format the value for display
(because Maxima punts to Lisp to format it).
Other Lisp implementations either refuse to compute a non-numeric value
(e.g. Clisp) or they compute it & display it (e.g. SBCL).
best,
Robert Dodier