Software Projects

Yes, despite working in the computer industry for a living, I do consider writing computer programs to be one of my hobbies. I was brought up on Fortran and various proprietary assembly languages before migrating to the (now mostly unused) language known as PL/M. I first began to play with the "C" programming language in the early 80s and by now I am basically as fluent as one can be in both "C" and its derivitive, "C++". I recently took up the language known as Perl and have recently been using it for all sorts of cool things. Perl is more of a scripting language than a large-system language but just for fun, I once wrote a very complicated file format translation tool in Perl with a multi-layered data structure that was a real challenge to keep straight. The reason one would program in Perl is that there are many very powerful text-handling features in Perl that, in general, one would have to write from scratch when writing in "C".

Anyhow, the most recent of my Perl adventures is an HTML macro processor which is what I use to maintain this very site. After all, the computer is very good at menial tasks like putting the same header and footer on every web page. Why should I have to do all the work? This is my general philosophy in writing programs. If I can do the job faster then I can write the program, then I just do it. But if I can toss off a which script to do the job in less time (and with fewer mistakes) then I use the computer.

Anyhow, enough dribble. Check out the documentation and source code for my HTML macro-processor. Also, when I get some spare time, I will put up the make system that I use to compile all three of my web sites with a single command.

You might also want to check out my list of Basic HTML References. While it's not really programming, there are a buttload of references there that I use on a regular basis to help construct these web pages.

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