In my opinion it would be a major mistake to shift over to that other bulletin board.

The reason that people visit this one is to a large extent because it is a conversational board that is easy to visit. You can click on the link and in a few seconds see if there were any interesting posts during the past month. If you don’t immediately see something you want to read about you can leave and go about your other business.

That other style board is fine for more technical discussions. But people who are interested in conversational posts would need to go hunting for information. And after just a few days they would probably decide not to visit the board any more.

The amount of Perl that has to be learned to modify this board is miniscule. It is almost the same as Basic. And I could do all of the programming myself. I simply don’t want to have to also be a a board monitor.

Perl is an attractive language because it is so easy to program in. But I am planning to post some notes to the Fortran Newsgroup to see if certain Perl features such as the “sleep” command can be easily duplicated with Fortran routines. That is supposed to be the case.

If I get a positive response to those questions I will likely dump Perl and move to Fortran as long as Roger wants to jump to that language.

The reason is that Perl simply has no Newsgroup support. The “experts” in that Perl Newsgroup are in my opinion really hostile. Even Roger could not get along with them if I remember correctly.

And although I like the Perl language, it is so difficult to determine how to do anything new with people having that type of attitude that it just isn’t worth the effort.

I did finally get the PDL module running. But there are a large number of fine tuning steps. And without people to ask what needs to be done it just takes too much time.

In contrast, the Fortran people were so helpful I actually had to tell one of them that he needed to stop sending me information as I couldn’t process it fast enough.

The Julia language might be even better from a technical point of view. But again, there is that support problem. They don’t have a Newsgroup and not even an E-mail address that I could find to send questions to.

If the Fortran people state that “sleep” commands can be easily built into Fortran routines etc. then I recommend that you (Skywise) move to that language rather than C. This is to make it easier for Roger and everyone else to develop routines using the same language.

However, modified versions of this present bulletin board would still have to be developed using Perl. And as I said, the effort is quite easy. Much of it just involves creating the right type of HTML code and then telling Perl how to store it in a file.

Perl read and save commands are actually quite simple. And as I said, if you can write a Basic program you can write Perl programs without any trouble. Also as I said, these efforts now need to be worked on by multiple parties. And it is just too difficult to determine exactly how to do this or that using Perl if you haven’t done it in the past. I don’t intend to have a two month battle just to get PDL fully operational.

These are personal opinions.