I must not understand quite what it is he's asking because it seems like an awfully lot of trouble in a Rube Goldberg kind of way to do what I would accomplish more simply.

All I would do is add the code for this "external" program right into the existing program where it's needed. That is, when the program has crunched all the data, then it asks the user what it wants to do with it, then depending on the choice, goes and displays it as such.

If the results of the number crunching are stored in some way, preferably in memory via some sort of data array, then the display routines can be written such that upon further input from the user, the data can be redisplayed from memory without having to redo all the calculations.

Then there's my feeling that Perl is not the best language to be doing what he may be doing, not that I know exactly what it is anyway.

I know exactly how I'd approach this problem in XBasic. It's already similar to the JOB analysis program I'm currently working on. The only difference is that I haven't implemented multiple display choices, but it'd be terribly easy to do so.

Brian