http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=554988

devnul has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello,

I find myself with a very tough problem involving lease calculations and was wondering if anyone might be able to help me figure out a solution here.

Basically I am getting a dump of data from an "old big clunky EBCDIC system". I've obviously converted this to something more ASCII-like and have removed all the non-floating-point pieces of data from each record.

The reason I've done this is because the system it comes from can only return "payoff information" for single leases entered by an operator and my client needs to know the payoff amount for every lease in the system (well over 200,000 - which would take an operator forever to accomplish), and this dump may provide the information to determine this. Also, being a proprietary system, this is about the only financial data I am able to extract from the system.

The issue I have is that I don't know fields are what -- only that by adding and substracting some combination of them, with a particular lease, I will arrive at a figure of $843.24.

I can't quite get my head around how to go about reversing engineering this formula, or even if this mountain can be moved.

Any help would, as always, be greatly appreciate.

- Devnul