To generate sun and moon data locations my Perl program calls a U.S. Navy Mica program directly and gets it running. That program will accept only information typed in from the keyboard. So Perl extracts the necessary information from a data file, sends it To the Mica program as if it had been typed on the keyboard. Then it instructs Mica to store the output data in a file where Perl reads it after a short time. When finished with those processes Perl closes the Mica program and goes about its business.

The entire opeation involves a complex, competitive sequence of processes. They take so long that a control program such as Perl must be used to perform the steps. People would not have enough time. And they would not be able to transfer all of the data without making a mistake somewhere.