> If you don't mean there's a universal definition of what a shell should and should not do, then WHO do you mean proclaimed that "computation is not meant to b

> If you don't mean there's a universal definition of what a shell should and should not do, then WHO do you mean proclaimed that "computation is not meant to be done via the shell or shell scripts"? One doesn't follow the other, the "computation is not meant to be done via the shell or shell scripts" is a statement i made and that was under the context of the Unix Philosophy. Also you are focusing on the wrong thing here. > Just because Eric Raymond writes something in a book doesn't mean it's true. I haven't read any of his books nor i see what he has to do with it. > I have enough experience to judge the "Unix Philosophy" myself Then why are you using floating point computation with a bash script as an example for where the Unix Philosophy is bad? Bash doesn't follow the Unix Philosophy, shell scripts aren't even meant to be used for floating point computation when you consider it, instead you should either use a tool dedicated to such computations or to the specific computation you want to perform. There are issues with the Unix Philosophy, like the simplicity it boasts only exists at a micro/local scale but it disappears at a macro/global scale - combining a few simple tools ends up with the combined complexity of all those tools plus the complexity inherent in the communication of them. To use these simple tools effectively you need to know all of them, knowledge of a single tool - despite how simple it might be by itself - is not very useful if it can only do one thing because an application almost never needs to do one thing. This isn't a matter of performance, since nobody ever claimed that following the Unix Philosophy would be fast - but many do claim that it is simple.