The MAX function returns the maximum value of a matrix or set of matrices. The matrices can be numerical or character.

The MAX function produces a single numeric value (or a character string value) that is the largest element (or highest character string value) in all arguments. There can be as many as 15 argument matrices. The function checks for missing numeric values and does not include them in the result. If all arguments are missing, then the machine’s most negative representable number is the result.

If you want to find the elementwise maximums of the corresponding elements of two matrices, use the maximum operator (<>).

For character arguments, the size of the result is the size of the largest of all arguments.

An example that uses the MAX function follows:

c = {1 -123 13 56 128 -81 12};
b = max(c);
print b;