Alex Wong's original DayPerl is one of the most powerful and popular development tools for applying Daylight technology. Chemist with limited computer-programming skills find they can turn their ideas to workable programs using DayPerl, while grizzled computer professionals have generated some very complex cheminformatics and molecular modelling applications. However, compilers and operating systems have evolved, and Perl itself has changed. DayPerl has proved difficult to maintain and install, and its syntax is somewhat outdated.

In this talk we will reintroduce the virtues of Perl as a modeling and cheminformatics tool, and discuss the new features of DayPerl2. Several interesting examples will illustrate Perl with 2D molecules, depictions for web pages, and cheminformatics with Thor, Merlin and DayCart.

Finally, we will compare DayPerl2 with other tools such as coding in C/C++, and Andrew Dalke's excellent PyDaylight Python module.

Presentation slides:

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