info completions, big fuss to compute the tangent of 15 degrees with gnu utils?

[Dan Jacobson]

I would just like to comment on the apparent difficulty of computing
tan(15) [tangent of 15 degrees]
with what I suspect are the main gnu utils for this case, gawk and bc.
Apparently tangent is a non basic building block function that one
would use sin and cos to make, so it isn't provided.
Also "degrees mode" isn't provided so one must multiply by pi/180.
pi is not provided, so one must do 4 times the arctangent of 1 radian
to get it...

anyway, I ended up using xcalc.

Perhaps I'm barfing up the wrong tree but I was amazed at the
difficulty for doing this simple task with what I found in the gnu
utils... did I pick the wrong utils?  I bet the calc package for emacs
could do it but it didn't come with the standard distribution...

dc's info [man] didn't seem to mention any trig functions.  bc [and
dc] has only a man page and no info page... odd: I can see the man
page by "man bc" or "info bc" in the shell, but what about in the
emacs info reader [C-h i]?  I don't think it has any way to get man
pages in case no info pages exist... so maybe gnu utils with no info
pages yet should have dummy links from the main info directory that
would pull in their man page...

By the way, here's a bug: in the stand-alone info reader, type m anystring
RET.  notice how it says "[not complete]" which is wrong, whereas in
emacs it says "[No match]" correct.

Anyways, for cases like bc, putting a "link" to pull in their manpage
from the main info menu wouldn't hurt.  That way when one goes into
info and searches for "calculator" one would find dc and bc.
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