Re: Scripting in Gnome

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 00:26, Chipzz wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> 
> > > VBA is needed anyhow for things like Gnumeric if they want to achieve
> > > compatibility with Excel
> >
> > There have been a number of attempts to clone VB.  All of which have not
> > taken off.  If you want to look to compatibility I would look to Mono.
> > VB might be different but by the time you had a VBA clone Excel will
> > have transfered completely to VB.Net.
> 
> While I do agree with you on most of what you said, this won't make old
> documents go away. So you're saying we should only be able to have
> scripting for the latest version of office documents (not even opening
> up the can of worms that VBA scripts open wrt sceurity)?

Well only a small percentage of Excel users use VBA.  My father uses
Excel extensively but only to make reports.  I have a friend who uses
VBA to do Health Care insurance calculations, but no one in his office
even goes near it.  Microsoft in the past has had no problems with
changing VB so that might just happen when Excel goes .Net.  So one can
go for a dying niche market and clone VBA (a task that has failed at
least with respect to a VB clone) or one could look to the future and
use a working Mono.  I don't see why class libraries couldn't be created
to emulate VBA calls.  Then again I am no expert in VB except for some
test scripts I wrote as an E*Trade intern some years back.  So I am not
sure how extensively different VB.Net is to VBA. 

Right now I think this discussion is getting a bit off topic from being
Scripting in Gnome to being Scripting in Gnumeric.   Perhaps it should
move to the Gnumeric list, dev-tools list or the language binding list. 
--
J5