Nearly everything in the slides can be done in portable POSIX sh(1) with only minor syntactic changes to avoid bashisms.
If you really want a big shell with more language features, check out ol' AT&T ksh¹, with things like nestable structured types and floating point arithmetic. [EDIT: and 'call by reference' using variable names, to address the problem of returning or mutating complicated things.] Some of bash's features originated in ksh, as did most of the POSIX sh features added since original sh.
Comments
Nearly everything in the slides can be done in portable POSIX sh(1) with only minor syntactic changes to avoid bashisms.
If you really want a big shell with more language features, check out ol' AT&T ksh¹, with things like nestable structured types and floating point arithmetic. [EDIT: and 'call by reference' using variable names, to address the problem of returning or mutating complicated things.] Some of bash's features originated in ksh, as did most of the POSIX sh features added since original sh.
(1) http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/shell.ht... ¹ http://kornshell.org/