use Perl

On the other hand, I've managed to get a reasonably complex parser written in it.
Taking a name - Osfameron.Adon@mycompany.com - it will split it into First, Mid, and Last names. Trivial? But our email address books have oddities like Dutch names having the prefix added to the first name - Wijnand-van-der.Valk@mycompany.com... And of course these prefixes should be part of the Middle name (to make alphabetising surnames less 'V' heavy...) whereas French prefixes shouldn't ("Le Brun")

With the various rules that we need to follow for this, it's a tricky but fundamentally doable task for Perl and Regular Expressions, but a horrible tarpit for VBA.

On topic?: Perl helped me write this application:

• First I wrote helper functions to recreate some of the functionality of Perl lists, and to avoid having to manually parse everything in every sub.
• I've learned how to manipulate lists in Perl, and you can play with lists the Perl way in VBA too, which is invaluable.
• Perl coding practise encouraged me to split things into subroutines. This is painful in VBA - my colleague who I thought of as a VB guru actually advised me to use Cut and Paste instead in some cases... and I will admit that one Function is about 150 lines long because I just couldn't bear to refactor it. But I tried...

But no matter how you apply the Perlish way to VBA, it is not Perl... Some of the things I missed from Perl were:

• use strict;

  (I don't think that

  Option Explicit

  is the same)

• Exception handling a little more sophisticated than

  On Error Goto

• warnings, diagnostics, helpful error messages.
• Not having to use the default IDE. (Tasty Vim goodness).

Programmers are always encouraged to learn other languages to get to grips with their features and constructs. I'm wondering whether I could recommend learning VB as a counter-example...?