Why is the stand-alone version written in Perl?
Because I like Perl. Also, the Internet version of the Alkalinity Calculator was written in Perl; so by writing the stand-alone version in Perl, I didn’t have to change most of the original calculation routines. If I had converted the program to Excel, I would have had to rewrite most of the calculations as Visual Basic macros. While it is true that Excel could have simplified the tasks of graphing and printing results, the disadvantages outweighed the advantages. Besides, if I had written the stand-alone version for Excel, it would have been relegated to the Windows world. By sticking with Perl, the stand-alone version is usable on a variety of operating systems (Windows, linux, unix, Mac?, etc.).
Because I like Perl. Also, the Internet version of the Alkalinity Calculator was written in Perl; so by writing the stand-alone version in Perl, I didn’t have to change most of the original calculation routines. If I had converted the program to Excel, I would have had to rewrite most of the calculations as Visual Basic macros. While it is true that Excel could have simplified the tasks of graphing and printing results, the disadvantages outweighed the advantages. Besides, if I had written the stand-alone version for Excel, it would have been relegated to the Windows world. By sticking with Perl, the stand-alone version is usable on a variety of operating systems (Windows, linux, unix, Mac?, etc.).
