PDL A way to deal with larger arrays
If you are working in scientific domain or using bioperl where you require to deal with bulk data processing then you should seriously consider learning PDL (“Perl Data Language”). PDL is actually a way to deal with larger arrays in Perl. It allows large N-dimensional data sets such as large images, spectrogram, etc to be stored efficiently and manipulated quickly.
To say it with the words of Karl Glazebrook, initiator of the PDL project:
“The PDL concept is to give standard perl5 the ability
to COMPACTLY store and SPEEDILY manipulate the large
N-dimensional data sets which are the bread and butter
of scientific computing. e.g. $a=$b+$c can add two
2048x2048 images in only a fraction of a second.”
PDL is well suited for matrix computations, general handling of multidimensional data, image processing, general scientific computation, and numerical applications. It supports I/O for many popular image and data formats including 1D (line plots), 2D (images) and 3D (volume visualization, surface plots via OpenGL) etc.
Latest stable release of PDL is PDL-2.4.7 and can be found at CPAN or Sourceforge.
Happy learning.