How can I walk through two files simultaneously in Perl?

Question

I have two text files that contain columnar data of the variety position-value, sorted by position.

Here is an example of the

Answer 1

Looks like a problem one would likely stumble upon, for example database table data with keys and values. Here's an implementation of the pseudocode provided by rjp.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

sub read_file_line {
  my $fh = shift;

  if ($fh and my $line = <$fh>) {
    chomp $line;
    return [ split(/\t/, $line) ];
  }
  return;
}

sub compute {
   # do something with the 2 values
}

open(my $f1, "file1");
open(my $f2, "file2");

my $pair1 = read_file_line($f1);
my $pair2 = read_file_line($f2);

while ($pair1 and $pair2) {
  if ($pair1->[0] < $pair2->[0]) {
    $pair1 = read_file_line($f1);
  } elsif ($pair2->[0] < $pair1->[0]) {
    $pair2 = read_file_line($f2);
  } else {
    compute($pair1->[1], $pair2->[1]);
    $pair1 = read_file_line($f1);
    $pair2 = read_file_line($f2);
  }
}

close($f1);
close($f2);

Hope this helps!