Ruby and Perl are programming languages used in many fields. In this paper we would like to present their usefulness with regard to basic bioinformatic problems. We concentrate on a comparison of widely used Perl and relatively rarely used Ruby to show that Ruby can be a very efficient tool in bioinformatics. Both Perl and Ruby have a built-in regular expressions engine, which is essential in solving many problems in bioinformatics. We present some selected examples: printing the file content, removing (...) comments from a FASTA file, using hashes, printing nucleotides included in a sequence, searching for a specific nucleotide in sequence and translating nucleotide sequences into protein sequences obtained in GenBank format. It is our belief that Ruby’s popularity will rise because of its simple syntax and the richness of its methods. Programs in Ruby are very easy to read and therefore easier to maintain and debug, which are the most important characteristics for a programming language. (shrink)

This article describes methods used in estimating skeletal age based both on the evaluation of skeletal maturation of the palm and the wrist and the Cervical Vertebral Maturation method. The method of evaluating the skeletal age based on the measurement of cervical vertebrae with equations introduced by A. Machorowska-Pieniążek is also mentioned. The article shows results obtained by computer analysis of the age of cervical vertebrae compared to the results gained from the implemented equations provided by A. Machorowska-Pieniążek and the (...) results obtained from the atlas method. (shrink)