Hi
it is not really clear to me what you want to do.
Sometimes I'm interested in doing some quick calculations or generating table formatted a certain way
For this I would advice to use a spreadsheat program like microsoft excell (commercial) or the open office ( open source) alternative.
I'm looking for text input, text output type stuff.
There is plenty of options here again. There are depending on what you want.
Options that come to mind are bat files; eclipse; visual studio (express version); ... (and plenty of others)
As it is not clear how the text input relates to the text output it is hard to advice on the best tool.
Best regards
Jantje