12 Sep
2014
12 Sep
'14
3:03 a.m.
On Thu, 11 Sep 2014, John Cowan wrote:
Hey, I never made any claim as to its veracity, and I lost my old manuals
in a house move.
On the *nix systems to which I have access, bc(1) is a standalone
program on FreeBSD and OSX, but pipes to dc(1) on OpenBSD. I cannot
check my Penguin box (Ubuntu) because its keyboard died, and I didn't
set up remote access to it.
All boxen say "arbitrary-precision arithmetic language and calculator" or
variants thereof.
-- Dave
I've
heard "binary" because it used binary arithmetic (and limited
precision), and "basic" because it was a lot simpler than "dc" (which
I've always thought was "decimal" calculator due to it using arbitrary
precision decimal arithmetic).
That can't be right. Bc was just an overlay to dc that parsed bc
language, compiled it into dc language, and fed dc from a pipe (all the
output was direct from dc). So the arithmetic capabilities were exactly
the same.