[TUHS] Etymology of bc(1)

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2014, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:

> What language does the undocumented option (assuming it is supported at
> all) "bc -c" generate on FreeBSD and OSX? "Standard" bc, which actually
> pipes to dc, generates (obviously) dc when run in this way, but GNU bc
> generates a completely different and as far as I know undocumented
> language, which is handled by the execute function (in execute.c) but as
> far as I know there is no way to make it accept it on standard input.
>
> Standard bc:
> $ echo '2+2' | bc -c
> 2 2+ps.
> q$
>
> GNU bc:
> $ echo '2+2' | bc -c
> @iK2:K2:+W at r
> @i
> $

FreeBSD 10:

$ echo '2+2'|bc -c
  2 2+ps.
q$

(yeah, I run ash... I got a chroot with Debian and the different userlands 
would cause conflict if I defaulted to bash)

-uso.