A command line calculator
In addition to allowing numbers to be arbitrarily large, bcalc stores non-integers via ratios rather than as floating point binary numbers. This means that precision isn't lost when binary floating point representations can't accurately represent a value. See this Wikipedia article for more information on this problem.
Note that this approach can't really be used for irrational numbers. This isn't a problem for currently implemented features, but planned future features will be able to result in irrational numbers such as the square root of 2. The current plan is to use some sort of approximation in the case of irrational numbers.
Supports history backscroll via up and down arrow keys.
Variable assignment supported through this syntax:
$var = 123
Variables can then be used in the place of numbers in later expressions.
bcalc can remember the input and variable history from previous sessions. This feature currently won't work properly, however, unless the environment is set up properly. This set up is performed automatically when via the installer for my utilities.
bcalc has support for several commands which are invoked by beginning the calculator input with a /. More information on commands is available via the help command. Without arguments, it lists the available commands. If it is given a command name as an argument, it gives more detailed information about that command. For example:
/help
/help help
bcalc supports several navigation hotkeys:
- Larger movement distance with arrow keys by additionally using Control
- Control+M when the cursor is over a parenthesis to jump to the matching one.
This project is still a work in progress. A number of features are planned or do not yet work properly:
- Fractional exponents
- The square root operator
sqrt