in reply to Perl: Quite a workhorse

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...