Perl is pretty bad when it comes to doing large scale arithmatic, and Perl is really lousy when it comes to storing millions of scalars. If using Fortran works for you, don't change it. After all, Perl is a glue language and I've never understood those people who always strive to have a pure Perl solution. But if you want to look further than your use of Fortran, you should look into PDL.

Abigail