Hello Miles.

12 Sep 04 05:01, you wrote to me:

 MM> G'morning Jasen,

 JB>> no spreadsheet, most of the arithmetic was done in bash
 JB>> (the linux command-line)

 JB>> n=12: while [ x lt 32 ] do echo $x  $((x*x))  $((x*x+1)) ;
 JB>> x=$((x+3));

 MM> Very, very nice ... time for me to go exploring...

oops I should have said

 JB>> x=12: while [ $x lt 32 ] do echo $x  $((x*x))  $((x*x+1)) ;
 JB>> x=$((x+3));

 JB>>  EVE/DID = TALK/9999

 MM> Ya have to know about the oddities of dividing by 999's... which
 MM> not many do.
....
 MM> I'd have lost a bottle of Lindauer had you been in one of my
 MM> classes !  (I have a little set of 8 problems for which a bottle
 MM> of bubbly is offered to anybody with a clean run - and eve/did
 MM> talk has saved me heaps over the years...)

basically that first step is what's important. and the 9999 trick I
remember from form 2 math class where they told us how to turn decimals
into fractions... which which it's possible to tunr the decimal
representation of any rational number back into a fraction.  from there I
attacked the problem of irrational numbers myself until I reinventd partial
fractions.

 MM> Lovely command line utility...what else is built in ?

all sorts of stuff, it's almost a general purpose programming language.
the program itself is 500K compiled and that's not including the
dynamically linked libraries.

It's the linux default command-line shell it serves basically the same
purpose as cmd.exe in windows

Jasen

--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.4.7