It's a shame that they provided such weird syntax for the most important thing you tend to do in a bash script, while providing fairly nice syntax for everything else.
Overall, it is cute and neat, but i find that if you are looking to write bash scripts that require this level of programming, you'd be better off writing it in python, or perl. Only in very austere environments can this be utilized, but the requirement of having `bc` installed means you must also have the ability to run package installation, so might as well run the package installation for a full on programming language!
I don't remember ever installing bc, but I use it frequently and it's always there. Are you sure it's not already part of most base systems?
In my bash scripts, using `bc` makes my script not work on git-bash under Windows. Almost everything else I do in a script that isn't linux-specific (including netcat/nc usage) runs in git-bash for Windows.