This is Debian GNU/Linux's prepackaged version of the FSF's GNU bc and dc utilities. GNU bc is an interactive algebraic language with arbitrary precision. GNU dc is a reverse-polish desk calculator which supports unlimited precision arithmetic. bc was written by Phil Nelson, Ken Pizzini wrote dc. bc was previously maintained by Bill Mitchell, Austin Donnelly, James Troup, and Dirk Eddelbuettel. The current package was put together by John G. Hasler from the GNU sources from http://ftp.us.xemacs.org/pub/mirrors/gnu/alpha/gnu/bc/ Changes are documented in the changelog.Debian file, and below. James Troup, the previous maintainer made the following changes :- o adding support for the Debian package maintenance scheme, by adding various debian/* files. o bc/scan.l (rc_len): define as int not char, to allow input > 128 characters in length without crashing. o configure.in: changed test for readline to use READLINELIB and not LIBS so we can link just bc with readline (as dc doesn't use it). o bc/Makefile.am (LDADD): add @READLINELIB@ Program Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Modifications for Debian Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999 James Troup. Further modifications for Debian Copyright (C) 1999 Dirk Eddelbuettel. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License with your Debian GNU/Linux system, in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL, or with the Debian GNU/Linux bc source package as the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. Manual (dc.info) Copyright (C) 1984 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation.