Most of the charts and data on my 90-05.html Web page were generated with enormous, complex Excel programs which I wrote over the past 5 to 10 years. They use so many cells (hundreds) that I had to structure them with layers of worksheets. With one of them, the bottom layer contains the original data with one line for each earthquake or precursor signal. The next layer up does the calculations. And multiple worksheets in the top layer display the results using different formats. Some of the data processing and data transfer operations are so complex that I had to create a variety of Visual Basic macros to automate them.

Huge Basic programs are used to calculate earthquake forecast probabilities etc. And I myself would actually prefer to stick with some version of Basic for doing that type of work. But since I am attempting to do a major programming language update I decided to see if I could find a language which people around the world could use. And I am presently collecting information on Perl, Python, and Ruby.

Perl is an easy, free download. So people everyone could use it and also exchange programs written with it. The download file is about 12 Meg in size. Upon installation it expands to about 50 Meg on the disk. I understand that Ruby is also a free download. I don’t know about Python.

Some other people have said that Python is easier to use. But I checked the documentation and did not see any major differences at first look. With all three if you want to multiply 2 numbers you use something like $a = $b * $c. That seems simple enough. The tough part for me has been determining how to open and close files etc. But I now have problems like that solved for Perl at least. Those languages also allow you to do sophisticated data sorts etc. which is nice.

What I am presently looking for in a new language is the ability to control Windows program screens. For example, it can be important to automatically activate one text file window using Notepad or whatever, copy a number from somewhere on the screen, activate another text file window, store that number somewhere on the screen, and then save that screen to a text file.

I haven’t been able to find any languages which make doing that easy. And that is surprising. I have a really old program which manipulates Windows screens like that quite easily with simple instructions. But it runs much too slow for general use and does not work with floating point numbers.