z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command ... - Christian Grothoff

c
A || B Is true if A is true or B is true. If A is true, the expression B is never
evaluated.
Comments and White Space
A comment has the form:
Instructions
/* Any string */
Comments can extend over more than one line of text. When bc sees /* at the
start of a The only effect a comment has is to indicate the end of a token. As an
extension, this version of bc also provides an additional comment convention using
the # character. All text from the # to the end of the line is treated as a single blank,
as in:
2+2 # this is a comment
bc is free format. You can freely insert blanks or horizontal tab characters to
improve the readability of the code. Instructions are assumed to end at the end of
the line. If you have an instruction that is so long you need to continue it on a new
line, put a backslash (\) as the very last character of the first line and continue on
the second, as in:
a = 2\
+ 3
The \ indicates that the instruction continues on the next line, so this is equivalent
to:
a = 2 + 3
A bc instruction can be an expression that performs a calculation, an assignment, a
function definition, or a statement. If an instruction is not an assignment, bc
displays the result of the instruction when it has completed the calculation. For
example, if you enter:
3.14 * 23
bc displays the result of the calculation. However, with:
a = 3.14 * 23
bc does not display anything, because the expression is an assignment. If you do
want to display the value of an assignment expression, simply place the expression
in parentheses.
The following list shows the instruction forms recognized by bc:
expression
Calculates the value of the expression.
“string”
Is a string constant. When bc sees a statement of this form, it displays the
contents of the string. For example:
"Hello world!"
tells bc to display Hello world! A newline character is not output after the
string. This makes it possible to do things like:
foo = 15
"The value of foo is "; foo
56 z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command Reference