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Comment by ubasu | Hacker News Reader

Or:

  echo "$1" | bc -l

No need to rev up python.

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I thought the same thing until I got to the part where the author used

  from math import *

Which gives you significantly more options.

I love this idea, I have always found math in the command line to be clunky.

That is true, but I have found if I am doing calculations that need something like the full math library of python, it's not a one-off calculation, and I am typically on octave anyway.

In any case, since I have emacs open all time, I usually do

  M-x calc

for one-off calculations.

I just evaluate random lisp in my buffers, sometimes evaluating it to output directly there. Ah emacs!

I do that too, with textadept & Lua instead of Emacs & elisp.

A little syntactic sugar (in zsh):

  function calc {
    print $1 | bc -l
  }

Then:

  calc "(1+2)*3"
  9

zsh actually comes with its own little calculator:

  zcalc "(1+2)*3"
  1> 9
  2>

Among other things, it features "full command line editing, including the history of previous calculations".

minor nitpick, you don't need "echo"

    $ bc -l <<< 3+2
    5
    $

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