On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 06:47:51AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote: > In some contexts it could even need fewer; for example, calc (as shipped > in Debian) provides the built-in function 'pi()', which takes a > precision - expressed as a value between zero and one - and returns pi > to that level of precision.
I do not understand this description. How many decimal places do you get for a precision of, say, 0.5? > The list of built-in functions in the bc man > page is very short, and doesn't include any such thing, so unless > something has added one without the man page getting updated anything > that needs to use pi is going to take more typing than with calc. True. But it's not a *huge* amount of typing. unicorn:~$ bc -l bc 1.07.1 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. 4*a(1) 3.14159265358979323844 scale=50 4*a(1) 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937508