Re: [Maxima-discuss] Use Lisp complex numbers in Maxima?

[Raymond T. <toy...@gm...>]

>>>>> "Stavros" == Stavros Macrakis <(Σταῦρος Μακράκης)" <mac...@al...>> writes:

    Stavros> o You might think it makes Maxima simpler to have all numbers be Lisp
    Stavros> numbers, but that isn't going to happen by itself. We will need to continue
    Stavros> to support bigfloats, and bigfloat complexes (and in the future perhaps
    Stavros> other composite numeric types like intervals). Of course, these could be
    Stavros> packaged up as CLOS objects, but again, I don't see that anyone has done
    Stavros> that work, either.

Bigfloats and complex bigfloat are already packaged up in CLOS
objects.  See the bigfloat package in src/numeric.lisp.  But that's
not really exposed in anyway to maxima; it's all for internal
processing.

One slight negative of using Lisp complexes:  you can't have purely
imaginary numbers.

For me the only advantage of using Lisp complexes is that presumably I
don't have to constantly call expand or rectform or something to get a
final numeric result that is just x + %i*y.  But if this really
mattered to me, I'd just do it in lisp.

--
Ray