Don't ampute numberformat

[Roland Huettmann]

I get around with numberformt, format() and own custom functions. But the
discussion is interesting nevertheless, even when repeating.

But it would be better to have consistent support throughout the IDE with
one preferred method covering also international formatting edge cases.

What I really would love to see are fields and lists (columns at least)
where a field/column/cell has a formatting property similar to Excels cell
formatting.

It would make life much easier to simply set such property from predefined
options. Or formats will be user-define manually or through script.

90% of overhead in formatting would be gone when entering or displaying
data this way. And dependent on the field formatting, the engine would
internally convert data types when addressing such field:

"put 1000 into field 1" would render "$1,000.00" if the format property
would have been set as such. And entering 1000 would format the field in
the same way. Using such values in mathematical operations would be
possible without the need to strip "$" and comma symbols or thousand
seperators, the  engine would convert text to number automatically even for
such formats.

Only for the output or numbers/dates rendered as part of a text string,
individual formatting of numbers/dates will still be needed sometimes.

Roland