Experience With Nickle

The various incarnations of Nickle have been used for a range of tasks. First and foremost, Nickle is the calculator program of choice: it is an altogether superior⁵replacement for UNIX bc, dc, expr, and the like.

Nickle is also a very nice general purpose programming language, especially for numerical work. Nickle programming projects distributed with the reference implementation include

• The Cribbage scoring implementation mentioned above.
• A DSP filter design package.
• Sample data generation for DSP verification.
• A full RSA implementation, including Miller-Rabin probabilistic prime number key generation.
• An implementation (now converted from Nickle to C for use inside Nickle) of Weber's accelerated GCD algorithm.
• A port of the C reference code for the Rijndael encryption algorithm.

In addition, numerous other projects have been assisted by Nickle, including

• Graphics chip clock calculation, and XFree86 ``mode line'' calculation.
• Probability calculations for Collectible Card Games.
• Course grading.

As noted above, the performance of Nickle is not spectacular, but is adequate for the tasks for which it is intended. For example, the Miller-Rabin implementation typically spends 5-15 seconds generating a 512-bit probabilistic prime on a 700MHz Athlon with adequate memory. This is about a factor of 5 slower than the C-based probabilistic prime generator of OpenSSH. As another example, the Nickle implementation of the Weber GCD code mentioned above is typically 10 times slower on a given input than the C implementation. On the other hand, the Nickle implementation was much easier to develop.

The end result of this experience has been that Nickle has become part of the authors' standard toolkit. It has reached its design goals: the current version is simple to use, extend, and modify.