Mr.T has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi!

I have been curious about the uses of Perl in every day life, as well as high tech life at places like NASA.

Does anyone know if NASA uses Perl at all for text processing, or other uses Perl can do?

Mr.T
qw/"I pity da foo' who don't use Perl!"/;

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perl and NASA
by VSarkiss (Monsignor) on Aug 09, 2001 at 22:10 UTC

    Most of the "hard-core" stuff at various NASA labs is done in Fortran -- it's very popular for numerical processing among physicists and astronomers, and there are huge libraries available for it. However, Larry Wall has worked at JPL in the past, so I presume some of his code (and his legacy!) is still floating around. As a matter of fact, this page from JPL about Numerical processing resources has links to some Fortran pre-processors in Perl1, which presumably someone over there is using.

    As for other uses, how about saving the Human Genome project?

    1Sounds really weird to me... ;-)

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Re: Perl and NASA
by suaveant (Parson) on Aug 09, 2001 at 21:10 UTC
    I don't know about NASA, but at Damian Conway's OO class he said that Wall Street was using Parse::RecDescent to move millions of dollars a day...

    Perl can be used for most things that C can, the trick is learning where it is better to use C, and where it is Better to use Perl, or something else. Perl is incredibly powerful, but in the end, you have to learn that for yourself :)

                    - Ant
                    - Some of my best work - Fish Dinner

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Re: Perl and NASA
by frag (Hermit) on Aug 09, 2001 at 22:41 UTC
    On Perl AI Resources, there's this link:

    Nasa Lambda Here you will find some Nasa Perl code for KST (The Knowledge Server Toolkit) and other Perl code. "The Knowledge Server Toolkit (KST) is a set of socket-based applications of monitor and control technology that can be used to solve problems in real-time. All of the tools are written in Perl." Not sure how usefull it is to us earth bound humans!

    Unfortunately, the link's long dead. But there's a conference paper at Google, and a paper titled "Perl Tools for Automating Satellite Ground Systems".

    -- Frag.

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Re: Perl and NASA
by aquacade (Scribe) on Aug 10, 2001 at 01:01 UTC
    Rumor has it ANOTHER government agency (drop the first 'A' from NASA) is a HEAVY user of Perl for obvious (text processing) reasons.

    I hereby disavow any suggestion that 'No Such Agency' is located in suburban Maryland near Odenton and that it may or may not have uses for Perl. ;)

    ..:::::: aquacade ::::::..

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Re: Perl and NASA
by blacksmith (Hermit) on Aug 10, 2001 at 17:50 UTC
    It seems like I read some where that the Navy was using Perl. Come to think of it, there is a site written for the NPSAC (Non-Prior Service Accession Course) for the Naval Reserves which has a message board written in Perl. I do not know if this counts that much though. The script was recieved through Matt Wright's website for free. So the webmaster did not write this particular script. The website is www.npsac.navy.mil. The Navy also offers online Perl courses for sailors though NetG, but you have to enlist first. Robert T Horn, SK3, US Naval Reserve
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