This is driving me crazy. I've searched here, online in general, and all the help files, but obviously it's so simple no one has ever bothered to explain it before! I'm a pretty naive Maple user, but I've been using it just fine to run some relatively simple numerical simulations. I've narrowed the problem down to this: 1.000000005 - 1 gives 5.10^-9 but 1.0000000005 - 1 gives 0 Clearly some rounding is taking place here. I've tried playing (systematically!) with all the options under tools>options>precision, but none of them seem to help. What am I missing?