Suaveant's suggestion of writing a filter (in perl, of
course) sounds like a good one.

I'd suggest you stay as close to perl as you can,
unless the syntax is just too wierd. Non-programmers
can handle some level of syntax... but then I'm assuming...

On the other hand, your proposed syntax looks fine.

Hey, have you thought of using an OO approach? Could
you define a perl object to contain your data + the
methods used to manipulate that data? For example,
would the chemists understand this kind of syntax?

loop $i (1 to 50)
   new data;
   data.read( datafile.$i );
   data.shift( 0.05 );
   data.normalize( constant=1.0 );
   data.write( outfile.$i );
   # note: could perl eval() the stuff in parentheses?
endloop
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-Rob