[BNE-PM] What do you use Perl for?

[Robert McArthur]

Hi Derek - as of a week or so ago, I'm no longer in
Brisbane but have temporarily moved to Canberra. However, I'm happy
to contribute if anyone's interested :-)

I have been using Perl since about 1991.  There I was analysing drought
data across Australia trying to model whether, from past data, there's
any hope of prediction.  Now, I'm using it tas a quick scripting
language for myself for pretty much anything, to being the frontend
for one of our production (see http://www.guidebeam.com ), to
research in extracting tacit knowledge from online communities
(texutal analysis mixed with maths using the PDL libraries).

Currently we're using OO Perl - Damian Conway's book is an
absolute must. I've used a lot of the modules over the years,
especially CGI, DBI & MySQL or Postgres, GD, PDL, Templte
Toolkit. For example, I recently needed to download all messages from a
Yahoo group.  This took only about 20-30 mins to write in Perl -
debugging the beast took the longest as I was scraping the HTML!

Good idea for a thread!

Cheers
Robert
(apologies for spelling mistakes - this is a shocking line and
it's almost impossible to go backwards to delete mistakes! Back to
the dark(er) ages)
---
Robert McArthur		CRC for Enterprise Distributed System Technology
  BSc(Hons)		  Ph. +61 7 3365 4310        Brisbane, Australia
  MInfTech		  Fax +61 7 3365 4311
  Grad.Cert.Ed.		  mcarthur at dstc.edu.au

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Derek Thomson wrote:
> Just for the sake of starting a thread, I want to get some idea of what
> everyone is using Perl for in their workaday existences.