Hmm, I don't really understand what you asking for. Do you expect some monk(s) to rewrite 850 lines of C code into Perl? Even though doing the same thing in Perl is likely to take several times less code lines, you can't ask that from monks trying to help others for free to do that.

I have just spent most of the last weeks rewriting into 3 Perl programs a really complex bunch of 50+ shell programs (tens of thousands of shell code lines) calling each other with various data elements, creating several hundred files in two dozen of different directories, with these processing running on five different computing platform. I can tell you that this is one of the most tedious developing tasks I had to do in the last decade or perhaps longer. Porting an algorithm is easy enough, porting a full application can be far more complicated.

I wish I could have refused to do it, even if that meant not being paid for those weeks (I am freelance). But I could not really refuse, because I am really the only expert on that very narrow subject, so that anyone else would have spent much much more time than me. My client would have hardly forgiven such an attitude from me.

I can tell you one thing: rewriting code into another language is often really painful. I would really have preferred to have a clear requirement specification and to do everything over from scratch. So, in brief, I am not gonna help you porting your C program to Perl (especially not for free).

But, if you know well enough what you need, and if you want to analyze yourself the C program and understand what it does, and can explain clearly what fuzzy matching you are looking for, and give clear specification of the requirement, then probably many monks, including myself, will really be willing to help (if I can, as far as I am concerned).