  The parameters of the nuclear liquid drop model, such as the volume, surface,
symmetry, and curvature constants, as well as bulk radii, are extracted from
the non-relativistic and relativistic energy density functionals used in
microscopic calculations for finite nuclei. The microscopic liquid drop energy,
obtained self-consistently for a large sample of finite, spherical nuclei, has
been expanded in terms of powers of A^{-1/3} (or inverse nuclear radius) and
the isospin excess (or neutron-to-proton asymmetry). In order to perform a
reliable extrapolation in the inverse radius, the calculations have been
carried out for nuclei with huge numbers of nucleons, of the order of 10^6. The
Coulomb interaction has been ignored to be able to approach nuclei of arbitrary
sizes and to avoid radial instabilities characteristic of systems with very
large atomic numbers. The main contribution to the fluctuating part of the
binding energy has been removed using the Green's function method to calculate
the shell correction. The limitations of applying the leptodermous expansion to
actual nuclei are discussed. While the leading terms in the macroscopic energy
expansion can be extracted very precisely, the higher-order, isospin-dependent
terms are prone to large uncertainties due to finite-size effects.
