Code Check

Ewen McNeill ewen at naos.co.nz
Mon May 5 05:33:23 CDT 2003


In message <1052123214.26999.11.camel at argon>, "James @bigfoot.com" writes:
>I think that my grounding in COBOL means that I tend to write PERL like
>a COBOL program. I put all the declarations at the front because of this.

Perl written like COBOL.  There really is more than one way to do it! 
(James: this is the perl motto, in case you haven't seen it: There's
more than one way to do it.)

>The suggestions to use modules like XML::Simple, among others, intrigued
>me. How can you find a module to do a job, if you you don't know what
>the module is called?

Ah ha.  One of the best features of Perl is CPAN.  CPAN, the
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is a network of machines with a wide
ranging library of (third party) perl modules which you can use.  Most
(all?) of them are distributed under the same conditions as perl.  And
there are several useful search engines.

You can find out more about CPAN, and search the collection, at:

http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/

(Or, for ease of typing: http://cpan.perl.com/  will redirect there.)

Generally when I'm faced with any "surely someone has written this
before" type situation I'll search on CPAN for a suitable module before
breaking down and writing the code myself.

XML::Simple, written by Grant McLean as it happens, is one such module
in CPAN.

Ewen



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