Phase of a complex number is wrongly understood to be zero by MATLAB

I am doing a calculation of the phase of a complex number. However, the magnitude of this number is so small (around the order of 10^-400) so that MATLAB assumes both its magnitude and phase to be zero. So, I guess one way to get the correct phase is to decrease MATLAB's smallest number. But I doubt that's impossible. Any trick to get around this?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The smallest number that MATLAB can represent numerically is about 4.94065645841247e-324 . 10^(-400) is right out for numeric work.

For higher precision you need to go for the Symbolic Toolbox.

[Imam]

Can you please elaborate what I should do with symbolic toolbox? Say I want to type 3e-400 in the command field. By default MATLAB will return 0, how can I make it so that it will print 3.000e-400 (for a given decimal places) as is?

[Walter Roberson]

sym('3e-400')

[Walter Roberson]

Along with vpa()

[Imam]

Thank you very much it works!