Hoc

Hoc (short for High Order Calculator) is a super handy tool for floating-point calculations. You can think of it as a powerful calculator that lets you interactively crunch numbers like 1 + 2 * sin(0.7). But Hoc isn’t just any old calculator; it’s got some serious programming skills too! You can assign values to variables, create your own functions, and use loops and conditionals—just like in real programming languages.

History of Hoc

The Hoc language was introduced in the book The Unix Programming Environment, written by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike back in 1984. This book has helped loads of people get into Unix and discover awesome tools like the shell, C, and Yacc. A lot of folks were amazed by how easily Kernighan and Pike built an interpreter—something that only experts could really do before Yacc came along!

Nadav's Journey with Hoc

One of those inspired folks was Nadav Har'El, who created this package. When he was just 11 years old in 1986, he typed in the source code for “Hoc 6” from that book. He started using it and even added features over time that he wanted to see. This package is the result of nearly ten years of slow but steady improvements to Hoc.

Modern Features

This version has many upgrades compared to the original one mentioned in the book! The code has also been updated so it runs on lots of different machines and compilers that popped up since '84, especially on ANSI C compilers. Don’t worry though; it should still work on K&R C compilers if you can dig one up from a museum!

Getting Started with Hoc

If you’re ready to start using Hoc, here’s what you need to do:

• First, run configure to generate the Makefile.


• Then compile and install hoc:
  
  
  
  • make
  
  
  • make install
  
  
  
  

You can find more details about downloading Hoc on this page: Download Hoc!