Re: Some Octave newbie questions regarding number format and matrices

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 09/20/2009 02:06 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermos wrote:
> 2009/9/19 hdfrango<address@hidden>:
> > 1. is there any way to force octave to express numbers in fraction form, to
> > avoid loss of precision?
>
> If you don't want to lose precision, you need a symbolic CAS, like
> Sage or Maxima, not Octave.

True in general, but you can use the command 'format rat' to at least
output the numbers as fractions:

octave:7> 1/3
ans = 1/3

octave:8> pi
ans = 355/113

There's also the rat() function that calculates rational approximations
to numbers to a given tolerance.