On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 16:20 +0200, Sjoerd Mullender wrote: > On 2006-09-08 16:01, Aaron Konstam wrote: > > On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 15:35 +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote: > >> On 07Sep2006 19:17, Khoa Ton <khoa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> | >| I find dc (man dc) very useful for floating point arithmetic. > >> | >I hate to tell you this, but dc does fixed point arithmetic, not > >> | >floating point. > >> | Thank you for the correction, Cameron. I will use bc instead > >> | of dc for floating point calculations from now on! > >> > >> 1: What's wrong with fixed point? For your purposes, I mean? > >> 2: bc certainly used to be a wrapper for dc, so it was fixed point too! > >> > > > > I am confused about this discussion. If numbers with fractional parts are handled it > > is doing floating point arithmetic. bc -l does floating point arithmetic. dc and bc > > work in such a different fashion it is hard to think one is a wrapper > > for the other. > > > > 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.
