I don’t really understand how you could read the parent comment and then suggest bc as a reasonable equivalent. For one thing I find interacting with bc to not be so interactive as gnu calc—you have to type one line at a time and it is hard to see intermediate results or make modifications. For a second thing, I don’t think bc includes:
- differentiation
- symbolic/numeric integration
- equation solving/manipulation
- unit conversion
- graphing
- vectors and matrices
- functional array operations like map/reduce
- statistical operations
- a detailed manual
Personally my main use of bc is: