[TUHS] Re: interesting case of not getting the point: dc on a mac

[ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>]

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Back in the day (mid 70s), Brian Kernighan and others from MH used to come
down to udel and talk about unix. CA 1976, udel was an early licensee, or
so we were told.

One of the funniest talks Brian gave concerned looking up words in a
dictionary, said words being all combinations of words you can spell from
looking at a desk calculator upside down. It was a Thing in the 70s, along
with disco balls I guess.

Anyway, he showed what you got when you started up the hopelessly
cumbersome look-up-a-word-at-a-time-in-webster's program that attempted to
be interactive.
"When you start it, it prints out its name and its version -- like we care
-- " -- at the words "like we care", the room just exploded in laughter.
That program was the perfect foil.

Every time I see this kind of ">>>" output from reimplementations of
programs such as dc, my only reaction is "like we care" :-)

On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 5:44 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 22, 2023 at 10:11 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 23, 2023 at 02:07:14PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > > On Sun, 22 Jan 2023, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> > >
> > > > I think there was one particular dc clone...guy whose name started
> with
> > > > a G? and his version did that.
> > >
> > > On my ancient MacBook Pro (13-inch, mid 2010, High Sierra 10.13.6):
> > >
> > >     mackie:~ dave$ dc
> > >     (^D)
> > >     mackie:~ dave$ dc -V
> > >     dc (GNU bc 1.06) 1.3
> > >
> > > On my ancient FreeBSD server:
> > >
> > >     aneurin% dc
> > >     (^D)
> > >     aneurin% dc -V
> > >     dc (BSD bc) 1.3-FreeBSD
> > >
> > > Nil prompt in both cases.
> > >
> > > > Most Linux versions use GNU's which Does The Right Thing???????.
> >
> > I know this is about dc (which I think is under bc or is it the other way
> > around?)
>
> The other way around. `bc` is a little interpreter that accepts infix
> notation and has a fairly complete language built into it that
> generates `dc` and delegates to that to do the actual mathematics.
>
> > but to pick on GNU:
> >
> > slovax ~ 'bc'
> > bc 1.06.95
> > Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software
> Foundation, Inc.
> > This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
> > For details type `warranty'.
> > slovax ~ alias bc
> > alias bc='bc -ql'
> >
> > because, well, the same reason I run vi in terse mode.
>
> Agreed. The copyright banner every time I run `bc` is excruciating.
>
> The `-l` argument came up not too long ago elsewhere; someone asked
> why `bc -l` is not the default. For those that don't know, `bc -l`
> loads a library of math functions (sine/cosine, arctan, and a couple
> of transcendentals) and sets the scale to 20 decimal points. It's very
> useful, but I suspect the reason this wasn't the default is that
> loading that library cost RAM and real cycles on a PDP-11 and for most
> simple uses that wasn't necessary.
>
>         - Dan C.
>

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