Thanks for the update. I stopped using perl around the same time 5.8 was slated to be the last version of perl 5, since perl 6 was coming Real Soon Now. I lear

Thanks for the update. I stopped using perl around the same time 5.8 was slated to be the last version of perl 5, since perl 6 was coming Real Soon Now. I learned perl in 1996 in order to cobble together a system that collected reports from all sorts of weird text files and formats (anyone remember Framemaker?) and merge them into one nice big postscript file with custom watermarks and page numbers. This program ran for at least 8 years after that. I had to learn perl in the dead of night because I had been instructed to find a "technology solution" and perl was "unsupportable". Another totally different program was developed to prototype a large orchestration of securities valuation and hedging. It even had numerical optimization in it. It was taken wholesale into production. Many other programs, some fairly long, were written in order to run successfully only once, and then they were retired. I loved perl. Then I learned python and could read the code that I wrote a few months ago and more importantly, read other peoples' code more easily. Consistent white space helps a lot. It had many of the same advantages of perl, with slightly clunkier regexes, plus a nice system for introspection. It could almost replace matlab--almost. I built a complicated optimization system that orchestrated multiple processors and called C++ library code so I didn't have to learn C++. I forgot about perl. I loved python now. Then I learned haskell and forgot about python but that's enough for today.