Nickle is a programming language based prototyping environment with
powerful programming and scripting capabilities. Nickle supports a
variety of datatypes, especially arbitrary precision numbers. The
programming language vaguely resembles C. Some things in C which do
not translate easily are different, some design choices have been made
differently, and a very few features are simply missing.
Nickle provides the functionality of UNIX bc, dc and expr in
much-improved form. It is also an ideal environment for prototyping
complex algorithms. Nickle's scripting capabilities make it a nice
replacement for spreadsheets in some applications, and its numeric
features nicely complement the limited numeric functionality of
text-oriented languages such as AWK and PERL.