Talk:Bc (programming language)

Just to head off any claims that the external link is self-promotion, I've got nothing to do with the CyrexSoft site. I spent about an hour implementing arccosine in bc before finding this link, so it would have helped me greatly. --Dantheox 06:20, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A paragraph and additional reference relating to the dialect C-BC have been added. -- Mark Hopkins, 5 February 2006

Actual usage

It would be nice to see a list of its actual uses and users today.

Is it actually used by anyone for practical purposes? I've seen that it's called "an arbitrary precision calculator dating back from Unix stone age" (in the Parrot virtual machine source tree). --Amir E. Aharoni 11:01, 14 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I may be a little biased, since I developed C-BC. But, in fact, I use the language more frequently than C, itself, because of its interpretative ability and high precision math. Often, I will also use it for prototyping C programs or for writing elaborate shell scripts. A link to the source code for the larger language C-BC was not provided on the main page. But a copy of the source can be found in alt.sources from October 3, 1993, by doing a search in Google's USENET archive (Google groups).

-- Mark, 13 September 2006

not everyone knows C

Can we drop the references to C.

I am sure this can be described without referencing a language many people don't know.

PS I use occasionally, but like most unix tools , I am sure I'd use it more if I udnerstood it better.

DGerman 00:05, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That would be a little difficult, since BC is based on C and was intently designed as a stripped down version of C, originally to provide a front-end for DC with a syntax more amenable for C programmers.

-- Mark, 12 December 2006