Is there a simpler way??

[yabba]

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[jeffa]

You bet. It's called CPAN. Here is a solution with Statistics::Descriptive

use strict;
use Statistics::Descriptive;

my $stat = Statistics::Descriptive::Full->new();
$stat->add_data(70,74,80,82,68,76);

print "mean: ", $stat->mean(), "\n",
      "sum:  ", $stat->sum(), "\n",
      "var:  ", $stat->variance(), "\n",
      "dev:  ", $stat->standard_deviation(), "\n";

Of course, you won't get much credit for this solution on the test. ;)

Jeff

R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--
L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--

[repson]

Here is one way I put together where I assume @values to already contain the data from the DAT file mentioned. Code untested.

# compute average
$total += $_ for @values;
$average = $total / @values;

# compute stddev according to your method
$total_deviation += ($_ - $average)**2 for @values;
$standard_deviation = sqrt($total_deviation) / @values;

# compute stddev as I recall it, probably wrong
$total_deviation += abs($_ - $average) for @values;
$standard_deviation = $total_deviation / @values;