A typical interactive usage is typing the command bc on a Unix command prompt and entering a mathematical expression, such as (1 + 3) * 2, whereupon 8 will be output. While bc can work with arbitrary precision, it actually … See more

POSIX bc
The POSIX standardized bc language is traditionally written as a program in the dc programming … See more

bc can be used non-interactively, with input through a pipe. This is useful inside shell scripts. For example:
In contrast, note that the bash shell only performs integer … See more

bc first appeared in Version 6 Unix in 1975. It was written by Lorinda Cherry of Bell Labs as a front end to dc, an arbitrary-precision calculator written by Robert Morris and … See more

Since the bc ^ operator only allows an integer power to its right, one of the first functions a bc user might write is a power function with a … See more

• dc programming language
• C programming language
• hoc programming language See more

• Dittmer, I. 1993. Error in Unix commands dc and bc for multiple-precision-arithmetic. SIGNUM Newsl. 28, 2 (Apr. 1993), 8–11.
• Collection of useful GNU bc functions
• GNU bc (and an alpha version) from the Free Software Foundation See more