D.14 mpfr

The mpfr library provides a rich assortment of floating point operations on arbitrary precision numbers (http://www.mpfr.org). These numbers are represented in a format that is not binary compatible with the standard IEEE floating point number format used by other libraries, but they offer superior numerical stability suitable for many ill conditioned problems.

The virtual code interface to the mpfr library follows the native API to the extent of using the same names for most operations, but excludes features pertaining to i/o, mutable storage, and memory management.

The mpfr library functions are invoked by an expression of the form

library('mpfr',f)

Aside from a few exceptions as noted, f is a character string derived from the name of the related function from the mpfr C library as documented at the above address, but without the mpfr_ prefix.

The full complement of available functions is documented in the remainder of this section.

• References to natural numbers pertain to the list representation described in Representation of Numeric and Textual Data.
• All functions that perform rounding use a mode of GMP_RNDN for rounding to nearest, which is not explicitly specified on the virtual side.

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