Thanks for illustrating how some people still completely miss the point. We are discussing the overhead of forking processes to do math, which Python doesn't have to do.

You're making a false equivalence like "there is slow arithmetic on both sides". No: one side is astronomically slow, requiring millions of instructions, the other side is tolerably slow, requiring hundreds of instructions. There is no comparison.

Again, this isn't about Python. That's just an example. It's about forking or not forking. You know, the topic of this thread.

If you like, I could translate my Python argument to JavaScript, and you could explain how a bash JIT compiler could optimize out all the instructions necessary to fork "bc" to call the cos instruction.

Let me head you off at the pass before you ask "Why would I ever want to calculate a cosine in a bash script?" when you should be asking "Why would I ever want to use a language that doesn't let me calculate a cosine? Or even draw a circle?"

To illustrate my point: Perhaps you want to write a script that draws a pie chart to illustrate your disk space. That's a typical sysadminy scripty thing to do, right?

With bash, you'd have to call out to many other processes to do that. Why is that? Tell me why hasn't anyone come up with a way to draw like the canvas API in bash, without forking off dozens if not thousands of processes?

Don't you think floating point would be useful for calculating disk space usage more accurately than integer percentages, and the canvas api would be useful for drawing pie charts?

If you think you'd never need to do something like that in bash, then you have an enormous blind spot from bash tragically lowering your expectations, imagination, and productivity as a programmer.

Because bash can't even perform the simplest APPLESOFT BASIC floating point math operations or HGR hires graphics HPLOT drawing commands.

So you would first have to fork off to one process to multiply and add a few numbers and calculate a cosine, and then you'd have to fork off to another process to multiply and add a few numbers and calculate a sin (because "bc" can only return one result at a time, thank you). Then you would have to pass those numbers to another program to draw them, probably with a here-file, some loops, a bunch of variable substitutions, temporary variables, intermediate files, lots and lots of string concatenation, converting back and forth between binary floating point numbers and strings, all meticulously decorated with a phalanx of quotes, escapes, double and triple backslashes, back-ticks, colons and exclamation marks before single character codes, and double secret parenthesis.