Maje numberFormst even better

[Richard Gaskin]

Roland Huettmann wrote:

 > Here is a link for Excel cell formatting:
 >
 > 
<https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/264372/how-to-control-and-understand-settings-in-the-format-cells-dialog-box-in-excel>

Good guidance - thanks for including the link.


 > Millions of users know this formatting style. Why reinvent the wheel?
 > Numberformat could eventually be enhanced to this direction...
 >
 > I still also wished to see it as a property-set of fields, but built
 > in, not "just" as a custom property. Dreaming...). It is a simple
 > user wish, not a recipe about how to do it. I understand that it is
 > difficult to do.

Like Lagi says, "Everything is easy for the man who doesn't have to do
it himself." :)

Why not have both, "good" now and "best" later?

Even if the core team were in a position to drop other priorities to add 
formatting to fields, they couldn't do it any faster than a scripter who 
has the advantage of doing it in LiveCode itself.

There are many things only the engine team can do, and for those we have 
no choice of what language they must be done in:  the engine is written 
in C++, so it requires a C++ expert to work on engine features.

As a attractive as this proposal for field-level numeric formatting is, 
there are many other tasks already in queue (it's been many years since 
I was able to play a video in Linux, and others have their own lists of 
preferred priorities as well).

So even the most optimistic projection of engine team availability for 
this field enhancement would be months down the road.

But we could have this by this afternoon with a behavior script.

Why wait?

Sure, an engine-level version would execute faster, and it's worth doing 
for language design and workflow reasons as well.

But a very useful behavior script could be crafted in an afternoon, and 
it would not only provide immediate value to those using it, but help 
with the design considerations that would have to go into an 
engine-based property later on anyway.

So we could consider the behavior script a prototype, but even better it 
can be used to provide immediate useful results.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com