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bc: A Handy Utility

Issue 56

From Issue #56
December 1998

Dec 01, 1998  By Alasdair McAndrew
 in
Mr. McAndrew shows us how the bc command can be used for prototyping numerical algorithms.
Conclusion

In my opinion, bc is a real find: it is small, efficient, self-contained and an extremely useful utility. It is not to be considered a replacement for a good fast programming language such as C, C++ or FORTRAN. But as a means for quickly prototyping numerical algorithms before coding them in a high-level language, it is excellent.

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Alasdair McAndrew lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife, three young children and a grumpy cat. He is a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Technology, where he teaches mathematics and computing. He is an enthusiastic and satisfied user of Linux, and has been since kernel 0.99; currently he is running Linux on both a desktop and a laptop. He enjoys trawling the Internet for Linux software suitable for children, and when he has time, playing the viola da gamba.

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If you are running the

HL's picture
Submitted by HL (not verified) on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 18:59.

If you are running the "Hofstadter's chaotic function" with the remainder part, please notice that the BC-utility has a bug with the -l option. It works fine if you use only "bc"-command, instead of "bc -l".

Tested on Ubuntu 9.04.

Clarification about "bc -l"

HL's picture
Submitted by HL (not verified) on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 02:26.

If you try the code with "bc -l", please note that you must set "scale=0". Otherwise, things such as modulo may seem to work unexpectedly. More here, accessed 28th August 2009 10:14, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bc_programming_language#Standard_library_fu....

Small notice. When you

HL's picture
Submitted by HL (not verified) on Mon, 08/17/2009 - 23:40.

Small notice.

When you copy-paste the amicable-code, remove the enter like:

define amicable(m) {
for (j=1;j<=m;j++)
if (sf(sf(j))==j && sf(j)!=j && j

Small error in the code: for

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 08/17/2009 - 22:51.

Small error in the code:

for (i=1; i<=100; i++) {
print h[i]," ";
if (i%10==0) print "\n;"
}

The "\n;" should be "\n"; .

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