(Note: this is a repost due to some of the beta-ness of the site).

BioPerl is a commonly-used toolkit for bioinformatics, but it does have it's share of problems. As educated_foo has pointed out, it can be slow, documentation is spotty for some modules, classes can be overly complex in some cases, and there are interface issues. And, for simple formats like FASTA it's probably overkill if you are just parsing data. Not …