(no subject)

[vyvyanx]

Yesterday I finished my database software. On Monday I remembered a piece of research I've wanted to do for a while, namely making a collection of sound changes from as many languages and time-periods as possible, to confirm or refute the various statements made in historical linguistics texts about frequency of particular sorts of sound change, which are inevitably more or less subjective and impressionistic. Before I can embark on collecting my data, however, I need a database to structure and organise the information. I decided to write a database program for this particular task, in Perl (it was either that or C, and I didn't feel like doing that much string handling in C).
Now it is finished, to my satisfaction anyway. It adds records, stores them in a compact format, displays them in a readable format, allows you to delete them completely or edit them by field, and enables searching by field or part-field. It is moderately free of code-duplication and has a certain number of comments, so I should actually have a hope of understanding why it works in a few months! (I don't usually do this :-) It could have more features, I suppose, and it's rather shorter on error-handling than it probably should be, and I expect the display features are terminal-dependent, but hey, only I'm going to be using it.
Now I'm entering data into it :-)
In other news, G and I are still looking for work, and have been watching B5 series 1 again.

Comments

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Yay, perl. Apparently B5 S2 DVD is out in May.

[surje.livejournal.com]

you are extremely hardcore to write your own database. i am in awe!