Dependence on Programming Experts
Joe Miller
jmmiller at poka.com
Wed Jul 12 17:01:44 EDT 2006
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
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