Perl and DNA
by Derrick StoryNetwork Newsletter for 09/16/2003
Dear Reader,
In his article, "A Chromosome at a Time with Perl," James Tisdall writes:
"Perl remains the most popular language among biologists for a multitude of programming tasks... One of the reasons why is that it's so easy to declare and use a string. You just use it, without worrying about allocating memory, or managing memory as the string shrinks or grows. DNA and proteins and other standard biological data are almost always represented in Perl as strings, so this facility with strings translates directly into a facility with DNA and proteins."
Tisdall then goes on to show a handful of tricks that enable you to write code for dealing with large amounts of biological sequence data while still getting satisfactory speed from the program.
This article and his new book, titled "Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics," are terrific examples of the power and versatility of this venerable programming language. Even if you're not directly involved in the life sciences, I think you'll enjoy reading how Perl is helping this community understand and catalog the building blocks of our physiological makeup.
Until next week,
-Derrick
Derrick Story
O'Reilly Network Managing Editor
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