Re: Math expression evaluation error?

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Jan 10, 10:48am, Ray Andrews wrote:
}
} is just to ask: What is most useful?  What would produce the maximum 
} utility along with the least surprise, especially for a new user? In 
} which direction is 'the future'?

Call me a cynic or a curmudgeon as you prefer, but the future of new
users who would give so little thought and study to the tools they
are using as to find this a problem more than once, is to not use
shells at all.

It *is* probably less than ideal that "zcalc -f" is not the default
for the actual calculator utility; but pretending that $(( ... )) could
ever be described "a calculator with no surprises or gotchas" regardless
of integer arithmetic, is misleading because it isn't a calculator and
trying to think of it that way is going to cause surprises and gotchas.