Vaughn Clement wrote:
> Frankly I was surprised that LC did not recognize commas and money
> symbols. This is a standard thing in almost any software that has
> numbers being used? I would think it could be added to the object
> inspector to set the money settings, and maybe still treat the field
> as a string for purposes of calculations.
I think this boils down to the difference between a general-purpose
programming language like LiveCode (and C, Python, Lua, etc.), and more
specialized tools like Excel and FileMaker.
Since Excel and FileMaker were written in C, we could say that this is
something that even C can handle. But it takes a great many lines of C
to be able to produce a system that separates storage from display, and
while we can do this in LC with a fraction of the number of lines
required, it still takes some scripting.
Similarly, both Excel and FileMaker have automatic behaviors associated
with cells/fields, but as you've found we need to explicitly respond to
specific messages in LC to trigger behaviors like calculations.
As convenient as these automated elements are in special-purpose tools,
they greatly restrict the range of things that can be built with them.
A spreadsheet will always look like a spreadsheet, and a FileMaker DB
will also look and behave like a FileMaker DB (which is why we see so
many LC devs making front-ends for DB systems like FileMaker, so they
can deliver custom UIs not possible in those highly-specialized tools).
All that said, as I noted before I think it would add tremendous value
to LC to adopt an option to automatically separate storage format from
display format for both fields and chunks, and have added my notes from
my earlier post to the feature request for this:
<http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7891>
In the meantime, we can have exactly what we're looking for right now
with a bit of scripting. I mention this not to suggest RunRev shouldn't
invest the time to do that in the engine (since of course I do feel it
would be very valuable), but only to note that there's nothing stopping
anyone from having this today if they're willing to roll up their
sleeves for an hour or two and work it out. After all, there are many
dozens of apps in the LC community that have done this already.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys
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