Num is much simpler than GNU Octave or J.<p>Num takes command line input, such as file of numbers or a standard input pipe, and outputs common statistics. Num has a goal to be similar to Unix standard tools such as sed, awk, and wc. We&#x27;re working to make Num fully POSIX compatible so we can write fully portable scripts.<p>GNU Octave and J are full featured languages, with excellent data structures, and you can do much more in these environments. R&#x2F;CRAN and Python&#x2F;pandas are similarly powerful. These all require installations of binaries or compilers, and involve ongoing updates of versions, libraries, dependencies, and the like.<p>Why use Num? Num is great when you&#x27;re writing a shell script and you want a lightweight way to do simple statistics. Num is great when you want your script to be able to run on a wide range of standard systems and be able to run as is for a long time. For example, we use Num for our system monitoring scripts, continuous delivery processing, and Ansible deployments.