I've been trading-in my habit of writing one-off Perl scripts for writing them in C#. I just clone a template file containing enough to get a "while(<>) { ... }

I've been trading-in my habit of writing one-off Perl scripts for writing them in C#. I just clone a template file containing enough to get a "while(<>) { ... }" equivalent and a vanilla regular expression going -- ninety percent of what my one-offs need -- and I'm off and coding. The result is something that may or may not be faster, or clearer . . . but it's a whole lot easier to debug when something goes wrong. I learned Perl about a decade ago, and have never felt that plumbing its depths (references were about as sophisticated as I got) would pay off. (I won't get into what I think is broken about Perl, because that discussion definitely won't pay off :-) )