Re: Once AGAIN perl saved my bacon

[Ay_Bee]

I have a similar experience, I am not a programmer, just an interested amateur. My work involves the use of a heavy duty mainframe database/sheduling system written in Cobol. All data extraction is in the form of printed reports which can take up to a year to get designed and written by the IT department if and when funding is approved. My boss had the need to combine data from an external source with data contained within the data base. Using perl, and a fair amount of hit and miss learn as I went, I was able to extract data from three separate existing mainframe reports and merge this with data from the external source. The resulting report printed using simple format commands has found its way higher up the corporate tree. Now the IT department has a budget and six month project plan to replicate my report in COBOL which took me three weeks to write in my spare time. Perl is amazingly versatile, simple when needed and free why do they bother??

Ay_Bee
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My memory concerns me
- but I forget why !!!