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