In Thoughts on script portability I touched upon some of the reasons why you might "re-invent the wheel." Sometimes all you have are sticks and stones and you have to be inventive.

I can think of another reason you might want to re-invent the wheel. If you have a crusty professor like I am when I am teaching you are darn sure going to end up re-inventing the wheel.

When I was teaching Perl to college students I often would pose a problem to them, for instance (right out of my lesson plan:)

Write a script to parse an input file and create a tree
of HTML elements and their leaf nodes.
[download]

Now if I had to solve that problem in the real world I would be looking to CPAN in the HTML::* space for the right module. But for someone learning Perl it is a good intellectual excercise to have to invent that wheel and program for it.

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