[klodolph]

For those not familiar with "dc", try running dc and then running "7 100 ^ p". Arbitrary precision! One of the reasons dc doesn't print things out is so you can use it to do arithmetic in your shell scripts.

[chocolatebunny]

you can use $((5+5)) if you want to do arithmetic in a bash shell. Most of the time that's all that's needed.

[smhenderson]

But when it was written when there was no bash. Or even sh.

It was written in B before the C programming language was created.