Hi, On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Charles Belhumeur <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks Steve! > > On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 10:15 AM, Steve Nickolas <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Wed, 8 May 2013, Charles Belhumeur wrote: >> >>> The other point... DOS had some notable shortcomings like no spell >>> checker >>> and no pocket calculator emulator. Remember piping simple one off calcs >>> into GWBasic from the command line? I remedied the pocket calculator >>> emulator by writing one of my own in MS Quick C. >> >> How about bc, as in GNU? >> >> It's not the most obvious such program but it does the job well enough >> that on my winbox I keep it around.
IIRC, originally on UNIX (tm), bc was just a wrapper around dc, but GNU bc (IIRC) is a separate implementation using bytecode. Yeah, it's got arbitrary precision, kinda like Rexx (or Lisp or ...). I even remember seeing one dc clone written in sed! Anyways, as mentioned, a lot of scripting languages are sometimes used for calculations (as you mentioned GWBASIC), e.g. the following all default to double precision floating point for numbers by default: BWBASIC, AWK, Lua. BTW, upon further reflection, I remember some other existing calculators for FreeDOS: a). Foxcalc (mostly just arithmetic with memory and pow and sqrt in a TUI form): http://www.viste-family.net/mateusz/dos/en/foxcalc.htm b). Necromancer's DOS Navigator's calculator (64-bit numbers??): http://ndn.muxe.com/ c). Georg's port of mbasecalc (programmers/hex): http://code.google.com/p/nanox-microwindows-nxlib-fltk-for-dos/downloads/list d). FASMD had one built-in, IIRC (Ctrl-F6): http://board.flatassembler.net/ P.S. BTW, I have no idea if MS Quick C supports "long double" as 80-bit extended precision or not. IIRC, ANSI C says "long double" only has to be as big as double, not necessarily bigger. GCC supports it, but I don't know for what targets (beyond x86, natch). Not sure how well-supported x87 is under AMD64. They prefer SSE there, which is only doubles (in parallel), last I checked. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. This 200-page book is written by three acclaimed leaders in the field. The early access version is available now. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/neotech_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
