I’ve been bothering this list about XML and arrays, for a geography project I’m 
pursuing. I’m making progress. However, I’ve now come up against a new issue 
which isn’t about LiveCode as such but which raises a fairly general question, 
i.e.

I need to do a calculation (see the end of this mail if you want to know my 
current need) - the calculation is a tricky algorithm which is in the public 
domain and which relies on possibly large data sets which are also in the 
public domain. I want to avoid coding the algorithm in LiveCode - or any other 
language for that matter. 

If I wanted to do this calculation personally as a one-off, I would go to one 
of a number of web sites that provide the calculation as a service, put in my 
parameters and read off the result. Simple. Now I want to do the same thing 
repetitively from within a LiveCode program. So I need a way to ’talk’ to one 
of these web sites as if I was keying information in and reading it out - I’m 
not expecting any special privileges like being given an more machine-oriented 
API to work with. So the question is, how would I go about coding this type of 
interaction? Has anyone done this recently? Are there any tutorials? I must say 
I find it very daunting, and would love to be told "it’s really quite easy”. 
Could be widget material, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s hoping

Graham

For those who want to know, my current case involves a succession of points on 
the Earth’s surface where I know each one's longitude and latitude: I want to 
convert the intervals between these points to distances in metres (say). This 
is a known problem, and AFAIK involves converting longitude and latitude to 
UTM. Several academic and other web sites offer services. Once one has the 
points in metres from some two-dimensional datum, it’s easy to calculate 
distances. All the GPS-display systems do it, usually imposing the route on a 
commercially available map and calculating how far you’ve travelled etc.
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