Jim Capozzoli wrote: > So, I pulled out the slide rule yesterday that's older then I am..and > I figured out how to multiply/divide on it. Is there anybody out > there still using slide rules for day to day math? Or does anybody > have any interesting stories/reminiscences about slide rules? I was > considering figuring out how to do Trig on it and then taking my Trig > final with it. :)
Well, I own a slide rule, it's in a drawer under my desk at home. But I have to confess that I almost never use it, because typing "bc -l" is much faster and delivers more accurate results. In fact I've bound "bc -l" to an inline hotkey of my shell's (zsh) command line editor, so the result is inserted at the cursor position. [*] Best regards Oliver [*] PS: For users of zsh, put this into your ~/.zshrc to bind the function to Esc M. # # Calculate an arithmetic expression using bc(1) # and insert the result at the cursor position. # user-insert-math-expression() { setopt localoptions extendedglob zle -I local X=$( stty sane <&2 read "X?Math expression: " <&2 echo -E "$X" | bc -l 2>/dev/null ) if [[ $? -ne 0 || -z "$X" ]]; then zle beep; zle -M "*** Error in math expression! ***" else if [[ "$X" == *.* ]]; then # Decimal point? X="${X%%0#}" # Remove trailing zeros. if [[ "$X" == .* ]]; then X="0$X" # Add zero before. fi fi LBUFFER="${LBUFFER}$X" fi } zle -N user-insert-math-expression bindkey '^[m' user-insert-math-expression -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M. Handelsregister: Registergericht Muenchen, HRA 74606, Geschäftsfuehrung: secnetix Verwaltungsgesellsch. mbH, Handelsregister: Registergericht Mün- chen, HRB 125758, Geschäftsführer: Maik Bachmann, Olaf Erb, Ralf Gebhart FreeBSD-Dienstleistungen, -Produkte und mehr: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd "FreeBSD is Yoda, Linux is Luke Skywalker" -- Daniel C. Sobral _______________________________________________ freebsd-chat@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"