I disagree. I saw two attempts on solving the problem and request for a perl interpretation. The original poster didn't appear to have picked perl on any particular merits except it being "exceptional at text processing". It is perfectly reasonable for this poster to have asked this question this way. Granted - this was only a snippet but that also means it's that also that trivial to answer correctly (not withstanding some other monk's really poor answers). I had a similar problem earlier this morning (it's 6.30 am here) when I had to solve a problem involving Python and the pickle module. It turns out my solution didn't require me to write Python code but there was a bit where it really looked like I'd have to buckle down and pick some up. The unfortunate part is I'd only be learning the language so I could edit one message in a message archive (mailman's pipermail if you're curious). I went to far as to grab a copy Python source to read Lib/pickle.py, asked on the CB about any perlish ways of accessing pickled data and started to dick into Pythons internals to see how to read my data. All that because there wasn't a pythonmonks.org where I could ask something fundamental like "I'm a perl programmer attempting to solve a Python problem and I need help instantiating a picked object, reading a record, altering it and writing the thing back to disk.". In this case the Anonymous Monk who posted the question knows VB (at least somewhat) but doesn't know perl. You'd have to assume somewhere that the poster is going to have to learn perl to make use of our answers but from my perspective there's nothing that should prevent the person from asking for help or from getting assistance. So nyah!
Fun Fun Fun in the Fluffy Chair
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