By using perl as a scripting language instead of a “traditional” shell, you can use much more C-like syntax without sacrificing functionality.

In Perl, every other array element is actually the index value. If you run into errors using associative arrays in Perl that tell you that you can’t use an undefined value as a symbol reference ...

Example Script: Filament Counter The above script doesn’t yet modify the G-code, so let’s write one that actually does something.

Basically, use <B>open</B> to create a filehandle (in the appropriate mode -- e.g. read, write, append, whatever) and then pass that as the first argument to printf, then close the filehandle.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed ...