Re: [Maxima-discuss] Other number forms.

[Soegtrop, M. <mic...@in...>]

Dear Przemek,

But it's the users' self-inflicted wound, because they chose to use floats. Dramatic increase of the number of significant digits in simple calculations is just the way the floats work: 1/3 is 1/3, but 1.0/3.0 is 0.333333333333333333333..... Of course solve(log(2)*x^2+log(3)*x+log(5),x) does not have this problem and returns a pretty, compact result.

This happens frequently to me with physical problems, where I have some decimal numbers from tables. I keep all values symbolic as long as possible, but in some cases it is substantially harder to solve an equation with all values being symbolic than with numerical values. Also in some cases one wants certain numeric values to be combined to judge their size. I could write 357/1000 for 0.357, but this is not very comfortable and wouldn't solve the problem of resulting in huge integers either.

Best regards,

Michael
Intel Deutschland GmbH
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