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> can't even necessarily depend on bc/dc being available in every environment

Just discovered this myself, also trying to make a language target shell. Was really surprised bc/dc was not present I think in Ubuntu install in WSL2. Also using awk for floating point math, but just shelling out to it.

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Yep! I considered shelling out to AWK for the same reason, as a bc/dc alternative, but rapidly found that nearly everything else bash could do was easier and less error-prone (and workable on much older systems) if I moved the whole script into pure AWK.

One of those occasional reminders that Linux != UNIX, I guess. Bc is mandatory in POSIX I believe but Linux never took that path.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition...

Honestly the first thing I do is get busybox, busybox's behavior is at least somewhat predictable.

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