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Financial consultant here. I use Haskell for this kind of thing.

In the event that I need a visual prototype to work with, together with a client or business partner, I don't think it's all that horrible to prototype something in Excel, and later port it to Haskell if necessary. But that's of course because I already, at some point, reinvented the wheel to make this possible. So now I'm mostly just reusing code which I already have available.

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Awk makes it trivially easy to parse text. How does Haskell handle this parsing task? I am curious because I've always wanted to learn Haskell, mainly because of its lazy evaluation, but hadn't had the time yet. Hope to do it soon.

Out of the box, it might not be the most intuitive text parsing tool indeed. It's trivial, but not immediately intuitive.

That said: strings are lists of chars, and Haskell is strong at pattern matching (esp within lists) in a bunch of different ways, so trivial text parsing tasks are trivial and intuitive in Haskell. For anything slightly more complex, there are regular expression and enumerating libraries which can do the job alright (and efficiently if I may say so).

EDIT: I'm sorry, can you give me an example of a problem so I can give you an example of a solution? :-)

im using python for this. just cause its simple and it just works.

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