I haven't tried StarBasic, but in the past did use VBA for Applications
in Excel and Access. Personally, because of the danger of malicious
mischief, I think having something that can only do things within your
own product would be a VERY good thing. If I understood Andreas
correctly, that's the way StarBasic works. So I'd say fix the bugs and
don't change its mission.
Then, if you need something that interacts with other things outside of
LO, use another tool designed for that, and make sure LO safeguards
adequately protect against the possibility of mischief.
-- Tim
===========================
On 10/15/2012 8:38 AM, Andreas Säger wrote:
Am 15.10.2012 13:31, Tom Davies wrote:
Hi :)
No-one is suggesting dropping Star Basic! That would be a huge nightmare for
many people i'm sure.
I was just curious what might be better. A quick look at what languages can be used for
macros in LO reveals 4 choices; LO Basic, Python, BeanShell, or JavaScript. I was just
wondering which was 'best'. Are all 4 really well implemented in LO? I guess "LO
Basic" is the Star Basic being referred to in this thread?
I think Andreas was just suggesting that choosing to use Star Basic is not the
best choice. However one of the great things about OpenSource is that you do
get choices. We can all disagree about almost everything and still end up
co-operating with each other even if we didn't want to.
Outside of IT choice is usually seen as a good thing. Many countries see
democracy as good and ostensibly give a choice of who you can vote for to rule.
In shops people would be outraged if there was nothing else to buy except
baked beans. People expect to be able to buy a wide range of diferent products
from different companies and for it all to work together well enough. Somehow
IT seems to demand dictatorships and freedom FROM choice rather than freedom OF
choice. We don't all do the same things and even if we did we probably
wouldn't do them the same way so it's fairly insane to expect 1 product and 1
company to be the only thing worth using.
I was just curious about other people's choices to help me understand more
about a subject i know little about.
Regards from
Tom :)
StarBasic is a separate lingo implemented to call the API of this
particular software only. It can not do anything outside the scope of
the office. It comes with a few convenience features related to this
particular API and the code is easier to be stored within office
documents. It does not include any math library beyond triangular
functions and basic arithmetics. It handles arrays in the most
complicated ways, it does not know any hashes, it has far too many bugs
and short comings, it is extremely complex and awkward (Null, Nothing,
Empty, Missing are different types of the same).
Basic is a 100% procedural lingo talking to an strictly object oriented
API which is the reason why you can not write any extensions in Basic.
MS Office and this office are the last resorts of this extinct lingo of
the MS dominated 90ies.
The alternatives are full featured, popular and mature programming
languages with dozends of modules to program anything you want.
A little bit of glue code makes them UNO compatible, callable from
within the office suite (Tools>Macros), from the command line and as UNO
components as well. Plain souce code files are much easier to maintain
and a programmer can use whatever source code editor he wants (the Basic
editor is no more than a cheap plastic toy).
All the object oriented languages can be used to write seamlessly
integrated extensions.
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