BASH question

[Aaron Konstam]

On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 16:20 +0200, Sjoerd Mullender wrote:
> On 2006-09-08 16:01, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> > On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 15:35 +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> >> On 07Sep2006 19:17, Khoa Ton <khoa at puresynergy.com> wrote:
> >> | >| I find dc (man dc) very useful for floating point arithmetic.
> >> | >I hate to tell you this, but dc does fixed point arithmetic, not
> >> | >floating point.
> >> | Thank you for the correction, Cameron.  I will use bc instead
> >> | of dc for floating point calculations from now on!
> >>
> >> 1: What's wrong with fixed point? For your purposes, I mean?
> >> 2: bc certainly used to be a wrapper for dc, so it was fixed point too!
> >>
> > 
> > I am confused about this discussion. If numbers with fractional parts are handled it
> > is doing floating point arithmetic. bc -l does floating point arithmetic. dc and bc 
> > work in such a different fashion it is hard to think one is a wrapper
> > for the other.
> > 
> 
> Fractional parts is not the same as floating point.  In fixed point
> arithmetic you have a fixed number of decimal places available, and in
> floating point, the point, well, floats.  But in either case you (can)
> have fractional parts.
> 
> And indeed, bc used to be (and perhaps still is?) a front end for dc.
> 
Well I am willing to learn but I am unaware that Pentium cpu-s have any way to represent numbers
with fractional parts other than floating point. So there is no such thing as fixed point representation of 
non-integer numbers on these machines.

In addition I have not found any way to have dc deal with non-integers but that may be I am
missing something.