4 ms·

The fact that dc does (or at least tries to) guarantee error bounds on the result is news to me. And if that does indeed work, that's pretty cool.

• nn3 7y ago
  I doubt the modern GNU or BSD versions of it that you are likely using do. Noone uses the original anymore.
  • swixmix 7y ago
    Is scale factor the same as error bounds in http://man.openbsd.org/dc http://man.openbsd.org/dc ?
    • nn3 7y ago
      I believe it's just the number of digits when the printing cuts off
• bloomer 7y ago
  The default Android calculator app by Hans Boehm (developer of the Boehm Garbage Collector as well) does this by using the computable real numbers. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2911981 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2911981 Provides a good overview of how it works and perms website has more information. What’s cool about the computable reals implementation is you can increase the precision after the fact and it will recalculate up to that precision. Basically it memoizes the steps of the calculation and how they affect the precision.