Printing numbers without exponential notation in Maxima

Question

I have trouble with WordMat, when calculating with Maxima, which didn't occur before, but started recently. When i calculate something that either results in x00000 or 0,0000x i get the result returned as its scientific expression, IE x*10^5 or x*10^-5. Even though this is correct, i would rather have it returned as a full number.

This only tends to happen when the number of 0's goes beyonda certain number, in the case of decimal numbers its from xe-5 and higher numbers its from xe9 and beyond. I can not turn this off in the settings as far as i can see, but it seems to be a setting in maxima simplification, with the variable option "expon" from what i found here:

file:///C:/Program%20Files%20(x86)/WordMat/Maxima-5.45.1/share/maxima/5.45.1/doc/html/maxima_46.html

Does anyone know of a way to either change the setting in wordmat, or edit the simplification rules in maxima?

I tried:

• Turning on and off most setting in wordmat
• Restarting my pc
• Reinstalling WordMat
• Looking through the manual for maxima/wordmat and looking for changeable settings

Answer 1

When you want to control the printed format of numbers, I think the best general answer is to use printf to specify exactly how to print the numbers. For what you want, printf(true, "~f", x) will print the value of x without ever introducing exponential format.

(The default maxima output is basically "~g" which basically automatically chooses between "~f" and "~e" depending on the value of x).

Perhaps a future version of maxima will allow you to change the default output range, but in general printf is the method to use if you want fine-grained control of the output.