Matlab and floating point, function for min n max?

[brandy]

so i found this program MATLAB on the computers at uni. I've been messing around with it. right now I am learning a bit about floating point systems and stuff and i thought it would be cool to write up a function that finds the smallest and largest numbers but turns out its harder than i first thought.
smallest was easy(er)
1*beta^m and I ignore the significant figures hehe, any ideas on how i fix that?

largest is hard. because i can't ignore them k's :S
will something like this work? I am not actually on MATLAB atm so i can't test myself haha.

u = 0.5*beta^(1-k)
c=[0:k-1];
result = sum((beta-1)*beta^M / beta^c)


oi and what's with the realmin realmax stuff, could i actually use that instead?

 

[NateD]

Yes, you can use the realmin and realmax functions in MATLAB to find the smallest and largest numbers that can be represented in the system. The realmin function returns the smallest positive value that can be represented in the system. The realmax function returns the largest finite value that can be represented in the system.