Calc is an arbitrary precision arithmetic system that uses a C-like language. Calc is useful as a calculator, an algorithm prototyper and as a mathematical research tool. More importantly, calc provides one with a machine independent means of computation. Calc comes with a rich set of builtin mathematical and programmatic functions.

Calc is built on top of the library libcalc that represents numeric values as fractions reduced to their lowest terms. This library can also be used to add arbitrary precision capabilities to your own programs and is available in the Debian package `calc-dev'.