Axiom Documentation

Real Numbers

Axiom provides two kinds of floating point numbers. The domain Float (abbreviation FLOAT) implements a model of arbitrary precisions floating point numbers. The domain DoubleFloat (abbreviation DFLOAT) is intended to make available hardware floating point arithmetic in Axiom. The actual model of floating point DoubleFloat that Axiom provides is system dependent. For example, on the IBM System 370, Axiom uses IBM double precision which has fourteen hexadecimal digits of precision or roughly sixteen decimal digits. Arbitrary precision floats allow the user to specify the precision at which arithmetic operations are computed. Although this is an attractive facility, it comes at a cost. Arbitrary precision floating point arithmetic typically takes twenty to two hundred times more time than hardware floating point. For more information about Axiom's numeric and graphic facilities see Graphics in section 7, Numeric Functions in section 8.1, and DoubleFloat

Introduction to Float (see Jenks section 9.27.1 )
Conversion Functions (see Jenks section 9.27.2 )
Output Functions (see Jenks, section 9.27.3 )
An Example: Determinant of a Hilbert Matrix (see Jenks, section 9.27.4 )