Hi, Peter,
This is brilliant! It will save me trips to Spotlight, my calculator of choice when the HP is too far out of reach.
I made one change to your macro which allows more complex math(s) to occur at the expense of useless trailing zeros showing up when doing non-integer math(s):
(That's a pipe "|" between the double quote and the "bc", and that's a lower-case "L" at the end of the expression.)
Change the "scale=" expression to the number of decimal places you wish when the result is not an integer. I can't seem to find a way to make bc act any more sensibly, but it does work. The "-l" option is entirely optional, but it does get you a few trig and other functions. See the manpage for bc here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html
...and then I realized just how ridiculous I was being to replace the Calculate filter, with its extensive list of functions, with bc, and its meager set of functions. I did, however, learn things along the way, so all is not lost.
But the reason I did it in the first place is because I tried the expression "sqrt(2)" and got... nothin'. (I'm an EE, so sqrt(2) is somewhat important.) So I thought, Heck, if Calculate can't do a square root, it must be rather basic. Better write a replacement. (What little I knew!)
So that leaves me with the question, Did I miss "sqrt" somewhere in the list, or is it truly not one of the Calculate functions?
Thanks again for this delicious macro!
Bill