From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:03:03 +1000 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Etymology of bc(1) In-Reply-To: <20140911221742.GJ23708@mercury.ccil.org> References: <877g19g8a7.fsf@gmail.com> <7A7060B7-0229-425F-BCF4-23C3669E167C@bsdimp.com> <20140911221742.GJ23708@mercury.ccil.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Sep 2014, John Cowan wrote: > > 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. 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