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Comment by harunurhan | Hacker News Reader

Several months ago, I was looking for something like this. Then I started using bc but wasn't enough for me then I thought why not Python? It has tons of math and statistics libraries/functions and easier than shell script with bc.

So I started using Python by simply typing Python and do my stuff. It is fast enough and super productive.

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FWIW, I use awk, which is POSIX standard

    $ awk 'BEGIN{print sqrt(2)+4;}'; 
    5.41421

bc is also standard but for some arbitrary reason I don't like it.

Another option would be to use the language called "R". I'm fairly new to it but its pretty much a programming language for math. Lots of libraries. Great programmatic graphing capability (ggplot2). Easy to dump file data into it.

In my lab a lot of biologists run there data with it. I think something like 80% of the graphs they publish are created in it. Better then excel in my opinion.

R, and Rstudio is what I've been using.

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