BASH question
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Fri Sep 8 22:04:48 UTC 2006
On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 16:24 -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> > 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.
bc works in decimal about like you would with a pencil. Think of doing
a
dollar calculation in integer pennies, then putting the decimal point
where you want it. I think dc does the same but with stack operations.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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