you can use pari-gp for your floating point needs inside unix. It's an extremely beautiful calculator language (for rational, floating point and polynomials).

you can use pari-gp for your floating point needs inside unix. It's an extremely beautiful calculator language (for rational, floating point and polynomials). Also octave and julia, if you are mostly interested in matrices, but they take quite a few miliseconds to start and are not as useful inside shell loops.