On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 08:46:28AM -0400, IT1 Stuart Blake Tener, USNR wrote: > In as much as bc only tells you which position in the string > "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" it corresponds too. > > Useless and incomplete without a script to complete it! Thus, a bug > worthy of being reported to the developers of bc.
No, it is compliant with the POSIX specification: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/bc.html Quoting: For bases greater than 16, each digit shall be written as a separate multi-digit decimal number. Each digit except the most significant fractional digit shall be preceded by a single <space>. For bases from 17 to 100, bc shall write two-digit decimal numbers; for bases from 101 to 1000, three-digit decimal strings, and so on. For example, the decimal number 1024 in base 25 would be written as: 01 15 24 and in base 125, as: 008 024 And of course, POSIX specifies it this way because *that's how it has always acted* in historical implementations. I have yet to see any real-life application that requires numbers to be written in base 36 using 0..9A..Z as the digits, *especially* from a shell script, of all things. That said, I have no objection to Chet adding such a feature to Bash, if he can think of a sane way to do it. If you have a patch that implements it, it's possible he'll be willing to review it.
