Tim Jenness, Frossie Economou, Remo P.J. Tilanus, Casey Best, Richard M. Prestage (Joint Astronomy Centre), Karl Glazebrook, Tony J. Farrell (Anglo Australian Observatory)
Reference URL: http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/jcmt_sw/perl/
Perl is used extensively at the JAC (UKIRT and JCMT) and because of the language's flexibility (enabling us to interface perl to any library) we are finding that it is possible to write all of our utilities in it. This simplifies support and aids code reuse (via the module system and object oriented interface) as well as shortening development time. Currently we have developed interfaces to messaging systems (ADAM and DRAMA), I/O libraries (NDF, GSD), astronomical libraries (SLALIB) and the Starlink noticeboard system (NBS). We have also developed tools to aid in data taking (the JCMT observation desk) and data processing (SURF and ORACDR)
This paper will briefly review the facilities available, with an emphasis on those which might be of interest to other observatories.