On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 16:38 -0500, Berna Massingill wrote: > On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 04:24:55PM -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote: > > >> 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. > >> > > I think you are: The man page for dc talks about a "precision value" > that controls the number of figures to the right of the decimal point. > You set this value with the "k" command; e.g., "2 k" to set it to 2. > > Compare the results of "1 2 / f" and "2 k 1 2 / f" for a quick example. > > -- > -- blm > Ok, k works as shown above. But these fractional numbers are all floating point. -- Aaron Konstam <akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
