What is "bc"

BC \BC\, B C \B. C.\n. before Christ; used in reckoning dates before the supposed year Christ was born, i.e. 1 a. d..

abbr. 1 basso continuo, a musical term used primarily in the Baroque period. 2 (context Internet slang English) because 3 (context law enforcement English) bodycam

BC may refer to:

• Before Christ, an epoch used in dating years prior to the estimated birth of Jesus

bc, for basic calculator (often referred to as bench calculator), is "an arbitrary precision calculator language" with syntax similar to the C programming language. bc is typically used as either a mathematical scripting language or as an interactive mathematical shell.

A typical interactive usage is typing the command bc on a Unix command prompt and entering a mathematical expression, such as , whereupon will be output. While bc can work with arbitrary precision, it actually defaults to zero digits after the decimal point - so the expression yields . This can surprise new bc users unaware of this fact. The option to bc sets the default scale (digits after the decimal point) to 20, and adds several additional mathematical functions to the language.

bc first appeared in Version 6 Unix in 1975, and was written by Robert Morris and Lorinda Cherry of Bell Labs. bc was preceded by dc, an earlier arbitrary precision calculator written by the same authors. dc could do arbitrary-precision calculations, but its Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) syntax was inconvenient for users, and therefore bc was written as a front-end to dc. bc was a very simple compiler (a single yacc source file with a few hundred lines) which converted the new, C-like, bc syntax into dc's postfix notation, and piped the results through dc.

In 1991, POSIX rigorously defined and standardized bc. Two implementations of this standard survive today: The first is the traditional Unix implementation, a front-end to dc, which survives in Unix and Plan 9 systems. The second is the free software GNU bc, first released in 1991 by Philip A. Nelson. The GNU implementation has numerous extensions beyond the POSIX standard, and is no longer a front-end to dc (it is a bytecode interpreter).

B.C. was an action-adventure video game in development by Intrepid Computer Entertainment, a satellite of Lionhead Studios, which was to be published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox. It was cancelled in 2004 for unknown reasons. B.C. was going to take place during a prehistoric time period on a single continent which contained five levels. The player controls a tribe who has to evolve and migrate to become the best species in the game. Tribe members can be of different classes and each can level up different ways to evolve. The main enemies in the game are an ape-like creature called the "simians"; however, the world is also inhabited with many types of dinosaurs as well as other creatures, including the dodo. In 2015, game preservation group PtoPOnline revealed gameplay footage of B.C. from throughout the game's development.