Recently, I have grown fond of Powershell. As someone who is also responsible for a little administration from time to time it quickly caught my eye as a language that could solve many mundane problems quickly and succinctly. Having originally come from a UNIX background I could see the Powershell Development Team had taken the best features from Korn Shell and Perl then combined them with the .NET framework to provide a very powerful tool. However, it's not all a bed of roses and this will become clear as you read on. I have recently been analysing various files containing financial tick data. Typically there are around two million lines in a file and each contains a comma delimited string with a date, time, price and amount traded of a particular stock. For this analysis I needed to extract a single column from this file and save it in a new file. The new file actually being used as input for GNU Octave. The Problem This task is typical and can easily be done with a tool
I have developed in a variety of different languages for a number of years. Mostly this is for whoever employs me at the time; however, a substantial amount of my development is for my own models and systems - I will try and share some of these here.