[Ecls-list] [Maxima] Maxima/ECL combination not printing a leading zero

[Dr. David Kirkby]

On 08/ 6/10 10:04 AM, Raymond Toy wrote:
>   On 8/6/10 1:59 AM, Robert Dodier wrote:
>> On 8/5/10, Dr. David Kirkby<david.kirkby at onetel.net>  wrote:
>>
>>> (%i1) asinh(1.0);
>>> (%o1)                          .8813735870195429
>> Appears to be a consequence of the way ECL formats
>> floating point numbers. I can produce an example on Linux
>> so it's not specific to Solaris. e.g.
>>
>> (format nil "~vf" 17 (/ 1d0 1.39239992382181823812d0))
>>   =>  ".7181844690534236"
> Nice example.  It's not even specific to ecl.  CMUCL and clisp print the
> same thing.
>
> The difference between ecl on Solaris/sparc and Solaris/x86 could very
> well be the floating-point units or the routines used to compute cl:asinh.
>
> (format nil "~vf" 17 (asinh 1d0))
>
> produces a leading 0 on Solaris with cmucl, but there's no leading zero
> on Solaris clisp.  The number value of (asinh 1d0) is slightly different
> too.
>
> Ray

It's worth noting however that the failure to print the leading zero is seen on 
a common CPU (Intel Xeon), albient with a less common operating system (Solaris).

The strange thing, when Solaris is run on the SPARC processor, the output is 
similar to Intel systems on AMD/Intel CPUs.

Small differences are to be expected when computing these things, especially on 
SPARC processors, so I'm not concerned about the exact value of the last digit - 
that's pretty irrelevant.

Dave