Hi Alejandro,
None of the below may apply to GNU's bc and dc. I prefer Unix.
> bc(1) on the contrary, is likely to be using 'long double', for being
> able to provide so many digits.
No, bc doesn't use a C language or machine type. The precision can
be set.
$ bc -l
scale=42
l(1114112) / l(2)
20.087462841250339408254066010810404354011270
$
bc's l() function is written in bc rather than a built-in and can be
read for fun. bc uses dc(1) to do the work and can be asked to ‘compile
only’ with -c. dc has k to set the precision; bc's scale simply uses k.
dc uses a byte to store each pair of decimal digits. This allows
overflow within the byte during calculations and makes it quick to
perform the common case of formatting the many-byte number to
decimal-digit text.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
