Num is much simpler than GNU Octave or J. Num takes command line input, such as file of numbers or a standard input pipe, and outputs common statistics. Num ha

Num is much simpler than GNU Octave or J. Num takes command line input, such as file of numbers or a standard input pipe, and outputs common statistics. Num has a goal to be similar to Unix standard tools such as sed, awk, and wc. We're working to make Num fully POSIX compatible so we can write fully portable scripts. GNU Octave and J are full featured languages, with excellent data structures, and you can do much more in these environments. R/CRAN and Python/pandas are similarly powerful. These all require installations of binaries or compilers, and involve ongoing updates of versions, libraries, dependencies, and the like. Why use Num? Num is great when you're writing a shell script and you want a lightweight way to do simple statistics. Num is great when you want your script to be able to run on a wide range of standard systems and be able to run as is for a long time. For example, we use Num for our system monitoring scripts, continuous delivery processing, and Ansible deployments.