properties vs local variable

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter Haworth wrote:

> If I remember the genesis of all this correctly, Terence wants to use a
> table made up of individual fields for each column because, amongst other
> things, you can't right justify data within a tabstop.

The field object rewrite is almost done, but there's still one critical 
item missing: tabAlign
<http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2282>

To be frank, I'm not sure how it got as far as flaggedText and the 
styledText array without first doing tabAlign.

The DataGrid is a beautiful solution for form layouts, but for list 
views its complexity is needed only because we don't have independent 
alignment for the field object.

As a form, the DG performs roughly on par with similar views, like those 
from from Apple in Automator; such things are inherently complex and we 
expect a certain reduced performance with those.  Apple's very picky, in 
a good way, and if the slowest-of-anything-in-their-UIs performance that 
the Automator action list delivers is good enough for them, it should be 
good enough for us.

But lists are different.  We have high expectations for them because 
they're so common.

And one of the common uses for lists is to display numbers, which are 
often right-aligned, and with financial numbers must be.

LiveCode's field object performs very well compared to the scrolling of 
large blocks of text in either Word or Excel; all in all, it's a fine 
piece of work.

Except for the mysterious absence of tabAlign.

The token is reserved, and has been for many years.

Yet somehow we got things like flagged ranges, while we still need this 
critical alignment functionality.

I'd love to see that finished soon.  We need it.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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