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

For numeric arguments, the MAX function returns a single numeric value that is the largest element among all arguments. For character arguments, the MAX function returns the character string that is largest in the ASCII order. For character arguments, the size of the result is the maximum number of characters among the 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 (<>).

An example that uses the MAX function follows:

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