Re: BASH question

[Les Mikesell <lesmikesell gmail com>]

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 gmail com