[ABE.pm] Calling Python/Ruby from Perl

[Michael C. Toren]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 09:33:19PM -0400, Faber J. Fedor wrote:
> I came across this way cool concept of Edward Tufte's[1] called
> sparklines[2] which I would LOVE to do in my reports.

I remember hearing a story about this on NPR this past weekend:

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5673332

The bit about the loss of Challenger and Columbia was particularly
interesting.

> Problem is, their stuff is written in Python.  How do I call another
> program from within my perl script and get a return value?  I'm hoping
> for something more elegant than back ticks or system().  Is there such
> a thing?

Hmm, what's wrong with system()? :-)

You may also want to see the section on "Using open() for IPC" in the
perlipc documentation.

HTH,
-mct