I can confirm empirically (using a couple of quick test that this is not a floating point accuracy issue in max.
bokan is right – if I remember correctly 23 bits equates roughly to 6 or 7 significant decimal figures, so you should expect to be fairly close to the value given (I turned off floating point correction in my preferences and sent the number from a message into a float object, then to the right inlet of another message box and it returned exactly – obviously there is still some rounding going on for display with float correction off).
There’s something else going on here to do with file formatting of floats – the accuracy is not good for text files (3 decimal places I believe – which is not always sufficient) and seemingly there is an issue for jxf format too. Given this is a non-human readable file format specifically for numerical data I’d expect all the values to be recalled exactly (the textfile thing at least has a clear rationale, even if it is potentially frustrating).
To be totally clear, for me the value recalls fine if I do so straightaway, but not after saving…
I’d say this is a bug and you should contact support with your patch and a clear explanation.
If you need a workaround you might look at other ways of storing the matrix to a file – there may be something on the forum relating to the accuracy of floats in files that can help you.
