Re: Base conversion within Base

[Greg Wooledge]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 08:46:28AM -0400, IT1 Stuart Blake Tener, USNR wrote:
> In as much as bc only tells you which position in the string  
> "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" it corresponds too.
> 
> Useless and incomplete without a script to complete it! Thus, a bug  
> worthy of being reported to the developers of bc.

No, it is compliant with the POSIX specification:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/bc.html

Quoting:

    For bases greater than 16, each digit shall be written as a separate
    multi-digit decimal number. Each digit except the most significant
    fractional digit shall be preceded by a single <space>. For bases from 17
    to 100, bc shall write two-digit decimal numbers; for bases from 101 to
    1000, three-digit decimal strings, and so on. For example, the decimal
    number 1024 in base 25 would be written as:

     01 15 24

    and in base 125, as:

     008 024

And of course, POSIX specifies it this way because *that's how it has
always acted* in historical implementations.

I have yet to see any real-life application that requires numbers to
be written in base 36 using 0..9A..Z as the digits, *especially* from
a shell script, of all things.

That said, I have no objection to Chet adding such a feature to Bash,
if he can think of a sane way to do it.  If you have a patch that
implements it, it's possible he'll be willing to review it.