I'm not responding to any single message here but a few general
comments about perl.
First of all I don't care what language you are talking about if you
have never used it you probably will see something that you don't
understand if someone shows you a program. Therefore, not
understanding Jared's small program doesn't mean that perl is
hard. After all if you have used || to mean or, seeing it used in SQL
queries or PL/SQL to mean concatenation is going to cause some
confusion until you have some idea of its meaning in this context.
Although I have not had an opportunity to do much with perl recently,
I was one who got people looking at perl when we moved off a mainframe
and onto UNIX about ten years ago. Why? Because of what I was able to
do with it. I was able to come up with things in a short period of
time that might or might not be needed again. Some of these quick
fixes became more than that - correcting a bad translation of a couple
of characters when reading those IMB standard label tapes into an
ASCII file was easy for perl and important to the eventual users of
the file. Even then I didn't consider myself a perl expert - it was
just very easy to pick up and extremely useful.
I think it might be relevent to mention how I heard about perl in the
first place. It was not from a techie but rather from a librarian. At
that point I was more of the exception than the rule in a position of
dealing with large machine readable datasets that our faculty and
graduate students use for secondary research - in a lot of schools at
that time the data was looked at as being infomation that belonged in
the library but not much had been done about library provisions for
using the data. I have a technical background so handling the data was
not a problem but standards for cataloging it were. It was in this
context that I heard about perl.
Pat
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Author: Pat Hildebrand
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