Based on your description, it sounds like there are significant gains to be made in efficiency and speed by rewriting. I'm interested in a follow-up -- can you give us some simple benchmarks when you are done, such as old size, new size, prior system calls, new system calls, and best of all, performance on a moderate data set?

Not only would such a magnanimous post generate cascading blankets of appreciative warmth from your fellow monks, the excercise might give you some impressive "bonus" information to pass along to the client in question, information that might make you stand out when they cast around for future contracts.

Uh, that of course assumes that the decision-maker at the client shop is not the original author of the script with a fragile ego to boot. ;-)

Matt

In reply to Re: the perils of others' perl - a cautionary tail... by mojotoad
in thread the perils of others' perl - a cautionary tail... by jptxs

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.