I am not especially fond of Perl. But it is fast and extremely versatile and is free for everyone on the planet to use and probably works with all of the major operating systems. It is also supported for free by an established company. So it is likely to be around for a while. And once you get used to it, it is not so bad.

The reason for using that external or secondary program is so that changes can be immediately made to the original program without the need to start the program running again. It takes my main program some 5 to 10 minutes to do all of the necessary calculations before I get to see the data. Then if I want to change the output display slightly I can make the changes without having to run the program over again. Also as I said, it makes it easier to correct minor programming errors.

The reason for discussing this is because I would like to find a versatile programming language which researchers around the world can use (for free) so that they can easily exchange subroutines etc. with one another. Perl is far from ideal in my opinion. But it does work. And its free.