BASH question

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 18:20, Aaron Konstam wrote:

> Look all this information is interesting. And indeed there have been
> cpu-s that were capable of fixed point arithmetic. Pentiums are not
> among them. I have not seen the source code for either bc or dc but I
> doubt if they implement a form of fixed point arithmetic. It would be
> possible to do this but it is an awful lot of trouble for something that
> can be done in floating point arithmetic and then displayed with the
> appropriate precision.
> 
> But if you know that bc and dc actually implement fixed point arithmetic
> routines ans can testify to that fact I will be interested to hear about
> it.

They do decimal integer math and shift the decimal point where
you tell it.  And they don't use the processor representation
since they can handle arbitrarily large numbers.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com