Dividends

At some point during all the various updates to the previous post I noticed that dronz posted an update to his calculator package in the goodie bag.  I haven't really had time to test it yet, but I spotted the note about my crappy build of bc.  Way back when I compiled bc I got stuck, unable to fix a segfault with the builtin mathlib, so it was limited to only the most basic functions.  Good enough for the rudimentary math required for zpub, but not much else.

Well, now I have a native compiler and a debugger so I took another look.  Turns out the segfault was due to gcc 4.1 optimizing out some important initialization functions required for the builtin mathlib.  I turned off the optimizations, and now it all seems to work.   Ok, my "extensive" testing showed the sine of zero is zero, and four times the arc tangent of 1 is pi according to the bc mathlib.  That's miles better than a segfault.

I have the compiler running on an SD card loaded with IZ2S 2.04, and the keyboard drivers on 2.04 are a bit flakey, so I decided to build another bc executable with the readline command line editing enabled.  That adds quite a bit of bloat, so it's not really suitable for the jffs, but it did help me with my testing on the jumpy keyboard.  So I guess I'd recommend the readline version if you're gonna put it on an SD card.   Otherwise I'd upx the smaller bc and go with that.

bc-with-mathlib-iz2s.zip

Here's a site with tons of goodies for bc.

Another site with code for making animated graphs from bc.  Perhaps it could be combined with zgv or imgv to make a graphing calculator?

Update:

I spent a few minutes with dronz' latest iz2jffs calc script and tweaked it up a tiny bit.  The resulting calc script runs bc with -l to load the mathlib, lets me change the scale, and can apply subsequent operations to a previous result.  That covers about 99% of my calculator usage, except maybe when I want to do hexadecimal math.