Perl: Quite a workhorse

In the few weeks that I've been able to use Perl at work (I'm a COBOL programmer by trade...let the cringes begin), I've found Perl to be quite a timesaver in more than one occasion. Case in point: I have a program which generates a CSV file. I got a complaint that the amounts in the CSV file did not add up correctly, so therefore the data file was corrupt. With about 20-30 lines of code, and the Text::CSV_XS module, I had written a validator for the file, and showed the output to the complainer. As a doublecheck, I brought the file into Excel and did the calculations there. Things added up, and people were happy. Had I needed to code a COBOL program to do this, it probably would have taken me twice as long than the Perl script did.

I've also written a utility to go through our source codebase and search for various keywords / phrases. I'm sure I could have installed grep in cygwin or something along those lines, but I needed a nifty little report plus a listing of the actual source lines. So, I whipped up another script, and got the desired output. Perl has been a great timesaver at work, and at home, it's helping me get things done as well.

Comment on Perl: Quite a workhorse

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Re: Perl: Quite a workhorse by ysth (Canon) on Jul 28, 2004 at 21:30 UTC
You may be interested in the Perl Power Tools, which implement a number of unix utilities in perl. Including Wumpus.	[reply]
Re: Perl: Quite a workhorse by graff (Chancellor) on Jul 29, 2004 at 04:48 UTC
Had I needed to code a COBOL program to do this, it probably would have taken me twice as long than the Perl script did. Only twice? I reckon you must be pretty good with COBOL. 8^) I count myself a reasonably okay C programmer, but a C program for doing anything CSV data would have taken me several times longer than a perl script using a suitable module -- and quite a lot more typing. I wonder what it would be like for a java programmer...	[reply]
Re: Perl: Quite a workhorse by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Jul 29, 2004 at 14:39 UTC
FubarPA, You said a mouthful! I taught my self to program in BASIC and severly embrased goto's, badly named variables, and general spaghetti string code. I learned enough Pascal to help someone else pass a college course and then on July 11th, 2002 - I found Perl. I have taken far too many things for granted and decided to teach myself C. This was so that I could better understand Perl internals and also make a meaningful contribution to Parrot. What you see below is my attempt at porting one of my very first Perl programs to C. Read more... (9 kB) Cheers - L~R	[reply] [d/l]