Re: Linear Algebra Challenge

Is a bigfloat still a hardware mode? I know that under the IEEE standard,
there is a precision called double extended which is 80 bits; that would be
about 25 decimal digits.

No, can't be in hardware. The bigfloat math has arbitrary precision and
exponent, so it could not be done in hardware. The 80 bit
extended-precision format has 64 bits for the actual value which will
give you about 19 digits. (The other 16 bits are for the exponent and
sign.)

I downloaded the Maxima source to see what I could find. I really don't
know lisp at all, from what I did see, and from playing around with the
program, Maxima's floating point appears to be using the 64 bit
double-precision hardware math. It's precision (about 16 digits) and
maximum exponent (308) are consistent with IEEE 64 bit format.

-wes

.

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