For some reason, I was using calc all this time. I mean, it’s good, but I need to do base conversions (dec, hex, bin) very often and you have to type base(2) or base(16) in calc to do that. That’s exhausting after a while.

So I now replaced calc with a little Python script which always prints the results in dec/hex/bin, grouped in bytes (if the result is an integer). That’s what I need. It’s basically just a loop around Python’s exec().

$ mcalc 
> 123
         123        0x[7b]    0b[01111011]

> 1234
        1234        0x[04 d2]    0b[00000100 11010010]

> 0x7C00 + 0x3F + 512
       32319        0x[7e 3f]    0b[01111110 00111111]

> a = 10; b = 0x2b; c = 0b1100101
          10        0x[0a]    0b[00001010]

> a + b + 3 * c
         356        0x[01 64]    0b[00000001 01100100]

> 2**32 - 1
  4294967295        0x[ff ff ff ff]    0b[11111111 11111111 11111111 11111111]

> 4 * atan(1)
3.141592653589793

> cos(pi)
-1.0

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That sounds super useful! I always used bc and ibase=2/obase=2 for conversions. But your digit grouping is what I always lacked. I gotta switch.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s the script, if you’re interested: https://www.uninformativ.de/git/bin-pub/file/mcalc.html

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! I already found it and patched it to run in my ancient Python version (no match keyword and exec(…) only allows globals and locals as positional arguments). :-) https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/mcalc-patched.py.txt