Trying a custom handler for several math fields

[Richard Gaskin]

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
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