>Could fltexpr maybe link to some other libm that is correctly rounded,
>like GNU MPFR, or LLVM's libm, to mention just a few?
I doubt they'd want to make bash dependent on any external library
like that (that may or may not be installed on a given system).
But you are certainly welcome to take a look at the source (fltexpr.c)
and monkey around with it. It doesn't look that hard to me; there are
only 3 or 4 "print" statements in it. It looks like the one "snprintf"
is where the number to string conversion takes place; you could
probably fix that yourself.
Interestingly, I tried messing around a bit with MPFR using GAWK, but
found it did pretty much the same thing as fltexpr does - which is not
what you want.
The other thing I wanted to suggest - since you've opened the door to
suggesting alternatives - is to run "bc" as a coproc. Note that I am
*not* suggesting running bc in the normal "one shot" mode - where
you'd have to run it ("shelling out" as you put it) once for each
calculation you need to make.
Rather, if you run it as a coproc, you run it just once and you then
communicate with it each time you need to do a calculation. The last
time I needed to do floating point math in a bash script - which was
years ago - I did it this way and it worked out quite well.
Unless you've already thought of and rejected this idea, you might
want to consider it. I don't know how much you know about coprocs in
bash, but it is worth looking into.
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