>>I agree with Chip and have a recommendation. Since you have been >>using Vim, Perl will be much easier to learn.
>>When I first began studying programming Perl was over my head and >>seemed very difficult. >I found it incredibly easy to learn Perl. I was faced with a large >data-reformatting program written in uncommented C that needed to be >adapted to a new input format. I started to work on it but it soon >became clear that fixing the program would take a couple of weeks. >I had vague memories of a language named Perl that was good for that >sort of text processing, so at the weekend I went into London, bought >the Camel book, skimmed through it on the train home, went into work >on Monday and rewrote the entire application in Perl. Not only did it >take me less than half the time to rewrite the code as it would have >taken to fix it, but the Perl version ran three times faster than the >original C. And quite likely, a 'lex' script would be able to do the same in about half as many lines, and taken half that time to do it. :D 'lex' rules!
