I hear you, re CSV. Join the dar... cough, Perl side, we have cookies. :-) We have CSV parsers and everything else, all the way up to e.g. good web libraries a

I hear you, re CSV. Join the dar... cough, Perl side, we have cookies. :-) We have CSV parsers and everything else, all the way up to e.g. good web libraries and the best OO among the scripting languages (Moose, ~ like the Common Lisp OO environment; more or less std for new Perl projects today.) And there is more! You can reuse most everything you know from awk! Write: perldoc perlrun Check for -n, -p, -i, -E flags. And, as many have noted, there is a2p. http://perldoc.perl.org/5.16.2/perlrun.html http://perldoc.perl.org/5.16.2/perlrun.html http://perldoc.perl.org/5.16.2/a2p.html http://perldoc.perl.org/5.16.2/a2p.html But the main reason is that we have fun. An insane programming language which throw all this "minimal mathematical notation" stuff out the window with some linguist inspirations, but still works wonderfully (do insist on keeping to the coding standards in your group. Seriously. At a minimum -- lie and say that you do that, when people interview for a job at your place. :-) )