"Today we're going to continue along on our series of posts
dealing with porting code between the bash shell, Perl and awk. In
previous posts, we've looked at the basics regarding simple string
variables, simple one-dimensional arrays and associative arrays
(sometimes referred to as hashes or 'lookup tables').
"Before we move on to logical programming constructs (such as
if-conditionals and while-loops), it's important to go over a few
other basic concepts that require translation in order to work in
the same manner in all three languages. Today we're going to
demonstrate how each of bash, Perl and awk deal with simple
arithmetic. Note that we won't be dealing specifically with
floating point math (although it is possible to do) since that's
slightly beyond the scope of this article (but it will be--huge
hint--the subject of our next post in this series... variable
scope, that is)..."