I've rediscovered BC

[hazel]

I'm currently doing the accounts for a pensioners' organisation that I have the misfortune to be treasurer for. I don't have a calculator installed in Crux, and you can't do everything with spreadsheets, so I opened a terminal and called up BC. I haven't used it for a long time.

I'd quite forgetten how easy it is to use. And how useful it is to have the results of a whole series of calculations simultaneously visible. With a graphical calculator, as soon as you start a new calculation, you lose the previous one. That's a big loss in user-friendliness just to have a pretty picture of a hand-held calculator to look at.

Some of these old command line apps still knock spots off the competition.

[Rubberman]

People keep forgetting the (in)famous KISS principal. I have to admit that I usually use the gui version (KCalc), but their are times when simply keyboarding the problem into a console application is faster, less error-prone, and more easily captured for later process review.