Thanks for the pointers; I wasn't aware of these packages.
While we're talking about this stuff, how come Common Lisp & Maxima don't simply use GNU MP (GMP) ?
http://gmplib.org/
A lot of Common Lisp's have a foreign function interface which should enable the ability to call at least some of these functions.
At 10:09 AM 10/20/2013, Raymond Toy wrote:
>>>>>> "Henry" == Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> writes:
>
> Henry> Isn't it about time to separate Maxima's "bfloat" package & make it
> Henry> a 'standard' Common Lisp extension. This would eliminate the need
> Henry> for a whole new set of functions and names which already exist in
> Henry> Common Lisp for hacking floating point representations.
>
>I had the same issue. The existing functions were somewhat hard to use
>and even harder to remember. Thus was born the BIGFLOAT package in
>maxima. It overloads all of the Common Lisp operations to allow
>working on BIGFLOAT objects as if they were CL numbers. BIGFLOAT and
>complex BIGFLOAT objects are supported.
>
>Unfortunately, the only documentation is in the source code in
>src/numeric.lisp.
>
> Henry> I, for one, would love the convenience of having bfloats in a
> Henry> non-Maxima Common Lisp.
>
>In case you didn't know, clisp supports long-floats of arbitrary
>size. You can set the number of fraction bits using (setf
>(long-float-digits) bits)
>
>The current BIGFLOAT package still requires maxima's underlying bfloat
>implementation, so you'll still need maxima.
>
>If you only need bfloats up to about 200 bits of fraction, you can
>take a look at Oct (http://trac.common-lisp.net/oct), a pure lisp
>implementation of quad-double floats.
>
>Ray