Tim Hardy

I’ve just discovered that you can run ghostscript in a no display mode from the console and use the interpreter as an environment to perform stack-based arithmetic.

tim@withnail:~$ gsnd
GPL Ghostscript 8.01 (2004-01-30)
Copyright (C) 2004 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA. All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
GS>2
GS<1>3
GS<2>stack
3
2
GS<2>add
GS<1>stack
5
GS<1>10
GS<2>mul
GS<1>stack
50
GS<1>quit


stack displays the stack, entering a number pushes it onto the stack, pop removes the top item, add / div / mul / sub remove the top two operands, and add them / divide them / multiply them / subtract second from first then return the result to the stack.

More info here.

One for computer science geeks only.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Linux, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.