Beyond BC Available?

[Tom Christiansen]

>Is there a follow-on to BC (circa 1978) available under UNIX?
>A more complete interactive C, that is?

I'm not sure that a follow-on BC would be interactive C, but if you're
not looking for infinite precision arithmetic, you could look at perl.

C with built-in sed commands and awk associative arrays
, with extensive access to system calls, even networking.  For interactive 
applications, you can use the perl debugger.

Perl has a fairly complete math package that's adequate for
non-numerically intensive applications.  Values are stored as doubles
and functions available are atan2, cos, exp, int, log (natural), rand,
sin, sqrt, and srand.  It has the full set of C operators, plus a few
more, including ** (and the corresponding **=) for exponentiation.

Perl is available from your favorite comp.sources.unix archive servers,
and there's a newsgroup (comp.lang.perl) devoted to it.

--tom
--

    Tom Christiansen                       {uunet,uiucdcs,sun}!convex!tchrist 
    Convex Computer Corporation                            tchrist at convex.COM
		 "EMACS belongs in <sys/errno.h>: Editor too big!"