How do you calculate?

[Amos Shapira]

On 20 May 2010 21:55, Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il> wrote:
> So I was wondering - how come there isn't more pressure on the Linux
> distributions to include a decent and convenient calculator language?
> Or do people consider what is available decent enough already?

"bc -l" is my own fingers' version for "pull out the calculator". It's
not installed on our servers by default so I have to "fall back" to my
desktop if I'm on one of them but that's it.

Sometimes, if the screen real-estate doesn't make it convenient to
switch to gterm+bc, I use the Gnome calculator, which is basic but
enough for my needs.

For a little more elaborate calculations with values pasted aside,
"what if" expressions with different inputs etc I use oocalc or Google
Docs (yes, I'm a "Google Bitch").

For calculating sums/averages/etc on numbers extracted from streamed
input (or formatted files) I use things like "awk -e '{s+=$N}END{print
s}'" with extra conditions in the loop and extra expression in the END
expression as needed.

--Amos