[gentoo-user] Getting BC not to truncate at the decimal point?

[Mike Huber]

Hi,
   I'm just trying to do some quick calculations using bc, but the version installed through portage truncates on multiplication/division.  It didn't used to do this 2 years ago when I was taking number theory, and there are no USE flags available for sys-devel/bc to change this.  From the manpage:

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The most basic element in bc is the number.  Numbers are arbitrary precision numbers.  This precision is both in the  integer  part  and  the fractional part.  All numbers are represented internally in decimal and all computation is done in decimal.  ( This  version  truncates  results from divide and multiply operations.)  There are two attributes of numbers, the length and the scale.  The length is the total number of significant  decimal  digits in a number and the scale is the total number of decimal digits after the decimal point.  For example:
               .000001 has a length of 6 and scale of 6.
               1935.000 has a length of 7 and a scale of 3.


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Anyone have any ideas?

--Mike