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Personally, I like the capabilities of bc very much. The best thing: It's available by default in the base system, no need to install any package.

The bc manpage is very informative and states in the first sentence: "bc is a language that supports arbitrary precision numbers with interactive execution of statements. There are some similarities in the syntax to the C programming language." Its versatility and support of functions, blocks, iteration, recursion and many more stuff you know from C or other programming languages. Just have a look on the EXAMPLES section.

"Even in windows I used to assign a shortcut to Calc and just bring it up, bash in the question, Ctrl+C and Alt+F4 or Alt+Tab out of it."

But can you change the values getting into the calculation? For example, if you entered

125+256+12554+569+9856+5874

and you see 256 is wrong and should be 526, you just go back and change it. Wow, easy, isn't it? :-) The command line is very comfortable to use. It also supports the repeat function.

In a GUI, you can connect "xterm -e bc" to a key or key combination to have it in a window. Because xterm supports buffer operations (click the middle mouse button), you can use the mouse to input and output values.

"I suppose the benefit of calculations on the command line is when you want to pipe the answer somewhere else?"

Yes, espeically when you want to do some system statistics that output into logfiles or system mail messages. But bc serves "allday use" purposes as well.

There's also Microsoft's unofficial http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.... that has history, limited graphing, and other things.

Beware of the PowerToy Calculator! It seems nice, but every once in a while it gives wrong results. E.g., it can give a value of >30000 for some x in sin(x) which of course should be impossible. (I don't have it installed currently so I can't test it, but try something like sin(PI*40).) Also, some variables might change their values unexpectedly (I've only seen this with variables whose name contains the letter 'E', but this doesn't happen always so it's a bit hard to pinpoint.) Anyway, I still think it's the best program MS ever made even if you can trust it only about as much as you can trust MS.

Then install bc (and a host of other GNU utilities) on Windows:

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

They're all just a download and an unzip away.

(Personally, I'm more of a dc guy.)

Edited 2006-11-27 13:53

Why use echo and pipe to bc? I always just type bc<enter> and work from there.

"Why use echo and pipe to bc? "

Maybe it's to illustrate the capability of reading from stdin, a "piping example"?

"I always just type bc(enter) and work from there."

Usually I do the same, see example above. You can have bc process files which makes sense if you define functions and / or data. For "small things" the regular interactive mode should work fine.

"Then install bc (and a host of other GNU utilities) on Windows:

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

They're all just a download and an unzip away."

I have been running bc on Windows at work for several years now and find it very useful. What I like and isn't mentioned in the article is that you can use variables.

The article mentions the advantage of having a print out of all of your calculations, but many gui calculators do this. One of the best here is Qalculate for Linux, but though simpler the calculator plugin for Firefox is pretty good too.

The problem with using Python though is that you need to type more before you have your answer, unless you keep Python running constantly..
So, anyone in for creating a win32 command line calculator? :-)

I just use:

#!/bin/sh
python -ic 'from __future__ import division;from math import *' $*

Put this in e.g. '/usr/local/bin/pym' and use yakuake as a very cool terminal an so you can fire up a calculator with:
F12 (or I configured it on "Scroll Lock") and enter pym

The advantage: a full scripting language with lists, dictionaries etc. And with rpy you even got the power of R while being able to use cool things like generator statements for complex sum-formulars! I love it.

The problem with using Python though is that you need to type more before you have your answer, unless you keep Python running constantly..

Not necessarily... you could always assign an one lettered alias to 'python', or even use keyboard bindings.

I keep Python running constantly, in at least a couple of Terminal windows...

I've used Python as a calculator for a few years now, and it's pretty good at any kind of simple algebraic math. One thing that I've found to be very beneficial is that you can set the variables of an equation to the calculated values for those variables, and then just punch in the equation almost how you'd type it elsewhere and get the answer.

For an EE minded networking class I had a small import that sets variables like Mbps, MiB, Kbps, usec, msec, Cvac, Cwire, etc.., so I could usually solve problems very quickly and accurately in the given units without thinking "how many seconds is 40usec?" This might seem trivial but for someone who is not often performing these calculations it really helps to not even bother thinking about them so you can keep your mind on the big picture of what you are trying to solve. (7 +/- 2!)

Another tip that is probably useful for those in undergrad CS courses is that if you find yourself doing something that feels especially 'algorithmic', attempt to program it. Not only do these small excersizes keep your practical programming skills relavant, but the process by which you go about describing to a computer how to do something often firms up your own ability to perform it and during your testing you will most likely discover any caveats or gotchas about the task at hand. It's for this reason (if any) that I suspect programming will become generally understood among most scientists and engineers.

I've used Python as a calculator for a few years now, and it's pretty good at any kind of simple algebraic math. One thing that I've found to be very beneficial is that you can set the variables of an equation to the calculated values for those variables, and then just punch in the equation almost how you'd type it elsewhere and get the answer.

You can do the same with bc.

Edited 2006-11-27 19:32

"While bc is useful for simple math, it does not do conversions like google."

How about this: While bc is useful for simple math, it does not do function plotting like gnuplot. And it does not search the internet. :-)

If you set the proper factors in a file and load it into bc's memory, you can do conversions as well, e. g. you can have functions like km2mile() or usd2eur(). They're not built in by default.

"speed of light" = 299792458 m/s[i]
"the answer to life the universe and everything" = 42

Sure these are conversions? The first one is a natural constant, the second one a universal one. :-)

% bc
bc 1.06
life=42
life
42

It knows it. bc knows everything as long as you tell it.

BTW: I usually prefer google in a GUI setting because it definitely is very decent, but bc is better in console / text mode. For each work the best tool.

Google is decent in text-browsers too.

But I prefer the 'units' program myslf.

Sweet, I can put away my old HP48G now.