On the topic of silly little scripts that help with math stuff, I’ve put in my ~/bin directory a script called ‘doc’ which does
octave —eval “doc $@“
So I can just pop open a new terminal and type something like “doc bicgstab” to go directly to their documentation (I prefer their terminal documentation interface to the gui one, but it is inconvenient to have it take over my in-progress session).
On the topic of bc, I assume it is just a result of it being an old Unix program from the days when an FPU was not assumed, but the need to pass the -l flag to get floats seems kind of silly nowadays.
octave —eval “doc $@“
So I can just pop open a new terminal and type something like “doc bicgstab” to go directly to their documentation (I prefer their terminal documentation interface to the gui one, but it is inconvenient to have it take over my in-progress session).
On the topic of bc, I assume it is just a result of it being an old Unix program from the days when an FPU was not assumed, but the need to pass the -l flag to get floats seems kind of silly nowadays.