DataGrid question...

[Curry Kenworthy]

Pi:

 > I’m not sure this is what Curry was thinking of. What do you think
 > he was eluding to. We’ve ‘known’ this for years now apparently.

I love the humor so far - well done, kind of like a skit/spoof of Fake 
News flailing under the weight of Accurate Facts yet insistently 
demanding more, LOL, if that was your intent. OK, I'll join in the fun 
and play straight man in the act to ham it up and help give cooped up 
people at home a much-needed laugh, and educational to boot. Our own 
little Punch and Judy show. Just this one more email though; I've been 
sick for weeks and need to catch up on work, so extra typing has to be 
very limited.

Generally known (your claim, not mine): List members quickly provided 
starter code for not 1 but 2 separate approaches. I'd say the existence 
of tabstops and clickH/mouseH is fairly well-known. Just a matter of 
actually applying what is known - that's a key skill and we've just seen 
a real live demo of several people doing exactly that. Good job, all!

Long time: Check. Tabstops and mouseH have been there since LC/RR 1.0, 
if the dictionary can be trusted for once. That's quite a while. I 
myself published an optimized column function back in 2011 or 2012 with 
SpreadLib (and my critics keep reminding me that was a long time ago; 
they can't have it both ways) so I assume I'd probably been using 
rougher column code for several years before that. And I assume other 
people did too.

(But I admit, on a geological time scale that's just the blink of an 
eye. And in the course of human civilization, I don't have any handy 
evidence that people in ancient Catal Huyuk or Jericho were using 
similar methods. However even animals have an innate sense of comparing 
larger and smaller amounts, and early civilizations solved highly 
complex problems, so I wouldn't underestimate them; I think the average 
scholar back then was very smart, and placing a given value into a 
series of values should be doable IMHO. But to stick to proven facts, 
it's indeed a "long" time in LiveCode terms, the capability was 
available for almost as long as LC/RR itself. But not in geological 
terms or "God's time" and the life of our universe; I'm afraid the Fake 
News might have me over a barrel on possible meanings of the word long.) :-)

Providing people have some background on field props, this is no trouble 
at all! I don't believe all learning should be by rote, AKA either 
someone has seen the explicit code and heard a spiel, or else he/she is 
completely helpless and innocent of the entire concept. For LC tutoring 
I would place a "which column" coding challenge exercise as: Beginner 
skill level for known provided equal-width tabstops, Intermediate for 
rough handling all field tabstops, and Advanced for a cleaner/shorter 
optimized and polished solution and/or handling paragraph-level 
settings. Never claimed it was a one-liner (typical fake news "flailing" 
with hyperbole, common media tactic) but as demo'd here it's not hard to 
make your own function, for those not function-averse or 
performance-averse. But yes the field is underappreciated and much 
sexier than the gossip and hearsay crowd gives it credit for. So it's 
great that we are increasing awareness and understanding and driving a 
stake into the heart of some misconceptions!

That concludes my brief battle to fortify field users against Fake 
News...for this round, but the war for hearts and minds never ends in 
our 24/7 media cycle! So I'll fly away back to my sickbed lair to 
recuperate (but not lick my wounds or touch my face) until the next time 
Forces of Misinformation and Mayhem rise once more from the gutters and 
perch on the gorgoyles to threaten the code-izens of our fair virtual 
metropolis. Carry on!

Best wishes,

Curry Kenworthy

Custom Software Development
"Better Methods, Better Results"
LiveCode Training and Consulting
http://livecodeconsulting.com/