![]() Scilab can be used as a programming environment and an interactive mathematical shell. A comparison of Scilab and MATLAB is clearly out of the scope of this article, but there is at least one area where Scilab clearly outperforms MATLAB, and that is, price! You absolutely don’t have to pay anything to use Scilab, whereas MATLAB is a relatively costly scientific tool. The two tools resemble each other to some extent, so that often a person skilled in one will find it easy to migrate to the other. Scilab is an open source alternative to MATLAB, another very popular but proprietary numerical computing environment. ![]() It can be used for signal processing, statistical analysis, image processing, fluid dynamics simulations, numerical optimisation, etc, often with the help of toolboxes like Image Processing Toolbox, Wavelet Toolbox, etc. Scilab is an open source, cross-platform numerical computational tool and a numerical programming language licensed under the GNU General Public License. Figure 1 shows the output of a division operation using bc with various levels of precision. ![]() On many occasions, it is a case of overkill to use powerful tools like Scilab or SageMath for simple numeric computations. The final reason for choosing bc for this list is that you don’t need a gun to kill a fly. This, really, is an important thing and if you have any doubts, ask those programmers working in the field of scientific computing, who are plagued by the proper representation of floating-point numbers and how difficult it is to tame them.Īnother reason is that though it looks very simple, bc is a Turing complete language, making it as powerful as programming languages like C and Java-at least in theory. Yet, we chose it because, first, it is an arbitrary-precision calculator limited only by the available memory of the host system and not limited to 8, 16, 32 or 64 bits of precision. Of course, there are far more powerful tools available to choose from. The decision to include a tool like bc whose development started in 1975 in such a list might be a bit controversial. GNU bc is available as free and open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License. The two important versions of bc currently used are POSIX bc and GNU bc. This utility is often called the bench calculator and can be invoked with the command bc on a terminal. The utility called bc (basic calculator) is an arbitrary-precision calculator language.
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