On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 01:11:21PM -0500, Mike Small wrote:
> I'm rather less "in the Perl community" than I would like to be, and the
> preference for XML over fixed length records here came from C++
> programmers. Not disagreeing with your points (I'll leave to others
> whether Perl is inherently unsuited to imitate COBOL) on fixed record
> file advantages ...
Perl does just fine at handling fixed-length record data. It has the
'+<' mode for opening files read/write, seek() for jumping to a
particular record, read() for reading a defined number of bytes*, ...
Just because there's not a fancy suite of huge libraries on the CPAN
doesn't mean it can't do it. It just means that there's no need for
fancy libraries because it's built in to the language.
* technically, characters, but only a loony would open such a file in
UTF-8 mode
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