[Maxima] Tests fail for Maxima (HEAD) with ECL 8.12.0

[Raymond Toy]

Aleksej Saushev wrote:
>   Hello!
>
> Some tests fail for current Maxima with ECL 8.12.0 on NetBSD 5.0_RC3 i386:
>
> Using Lisp ECL 8.12.0 (CVS 2008-07-12 18:54)
> Running tests in rtest14: 
> ********************** Problem 129 ***************
> Input:
> closeto(AS_10_4_15(- 10), 1.e-15)
>
>
> Result:
>                                      1  20 sqrt(10)
> .3333333333333333 sqrt(10) (bessel_j(-, -----------)
>                                      3       3
>                                                1  20 sqrt(10)
>                                   + bessel_j(- -, -----------)) - airy_ai(- 10)
>                                                3       3
>
>   
This bug (or was it the next one?) has been there for a while. I only
see this with ecl; the other Lisps I've used (clisp, cmucl, gcl) work. I
been too lazy to look at it. :-(

> Input:
>        60
>       2   - 1
> float(-------) - 1
>          60
>         2
>
>
> Result:
> - 1.110223024625157e-16
>
>   
This and similar failures are recent. I think it's a deficiency in how
ecl converts big ratios to floats using cl:float. I don't really want to
work around this bug just for ecl. We could just borrow the code from
cmucl (or others) that convert ratios to floats.

Ray