[Maxima] continued fractions for nth degree roots

[Stavros Macrakis]

Some examples of the difference in computation cost below.  Tracing ratsimp
shows that it is doing very big and expensive algebraic calculations.

cf(2^(9/10)),cflength:3 => [1,1,6]
         Evaluation took 84.57 seconds
cf(bfloat(2^(9/10))),fpprec:15 => [1,1,6,2,6,1,13,1,3,2,2,2,1,1,12,7]
         Evaluation took 0.10 seconds

cf(2^(1/3)),cflength:1000;
         Evaluation took 23.69 seconds

cf(bfloat(2^(1/3))),fpprec:1200 (gives 1200 terms)
         Evaluation took 0.70 seconds
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.math.utexas.edu/pipermail/maxima/attachments/20070206/cd5a355d/attachment.htm