The quantity Float(infinity) represents a floating-point infinity. This value is used to indicate a floating-point value that is too large to be otherwise represented with the current maximum Digits.
The maximum Digits used when calculating with Maple can be increased with the Digits environment variable. Additionally setting
UseHardwareFloats:=false:
may also prevent this occurring if the limit is due to hardware floats being used.
In general setting
Digits:=16:
or above will also prevent hardware-floats from being used. The upper bound for hardware floats can be queried with the special call evalhf(Digits): which will return 15 on all modern platforms.
The value you should set Digits to will depend on the precision needed in your calculations as well as the maximum exponent needed.
If you want the number of digits displayed to be fewer than the digits used in calculations you can use
interface(displayprecision=5):
Additionally you can find more settings under
Tools > Options > Precision
on Windows and Linux, or
Maple 2020 > Preferences > Precision
on Mac. The option to "Round screen display to" is equivalent to interface(displayprecision) but can be set globally.
Using Hardware floats is often faster but is limited to what the hardware of your computer can compute.
Higher values of Digits (above the default of 10) may result in longer calculations but more accurate results.
Further information can be found at our help pages for:
Software Floating-point Numbers and Their Constructors