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.