Dependence on Programming Experts

[Joe Miller]

I'm very new to Revolution and I certainly don't consider myself to be 
a programmer.  I do occasionally (i.e., when it is absolutely 
necessary) write macros for Excel.  Excel is the standard for many of 
us dealing with financial and economic data,  but compatibility issues 
can make distributing workbooks with macros (and sometimes even those 
without macros)  to anyone except the more sophisticated users a real 
pain.  Some macros written by others simply won't run on my Mac.

I'm the end user of most of my work, but when some distribution is 
necessary Revolution seemed like a good solution for applications that 
base calculations of some user inputs if a large number of cells were 
not required.  You could simply substitute fields for cells.  This 
seemed like a quick and easy solution for reaching people that don't 
have Excel or are intimidated by it.

Not being able to use the equal sign to assign a value to variable 
struck me as odd.  Not so much because that's the way we do it in VBA, 
but because I firmly believe that's the way I think.  If I'm writing a 
problem in longhand that's the way I do it.    In fact, I wouldn't be 
surprised if some people that deal constantly with complex formulas 
might be a little put off or even amused at using "Put".   Given the 
option,  I would certainly use the equal sign and think that many other 
potential users might make the same decision.

That said, it's really no big deal.  I have been fascinated by the 
discussion and was just a little surprised at the quantity and 
intensity of the objections to having "equal"  as just an option.


Joe Miller