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Today I am hating (actually, for the last week I have been hating)
spreadsheet cell notation. A2, F7, BA99, etc.
Basic problems:
a) I don't think in letters. 'M' doesn't automatically seem ten over
than 'C' where '13' does compared to '3';
b) They're indexed from one, not zero. I've been a programmer too long
and this is driving me nuts.
c) Using different units for going across rather than down is *nuts*.
It's impossible to reuse code that you've written for addition
in one dimension for going in the other
d) When the spreadsheet goes to three dimensions (i.e. it has multiple
'sheets' in the book) it goes truly insane. Now I have to write
this in Excel:
='Sheet 1'!A1 + 'Sheet2'!A1 + 'Sheet3'!A1
Yep that's right. I have to remember what my sheets are called.
Well *that's* reusable. And can I just use a =SUM(...). Nope, gotta
do each of the sheets individually.
Oh and Excel formulas have a maximum length of 1024 chars. So if you
have too many sheets you're screwed.
Who came up with this notation? What's wrong with a *comma* to delimit
across and down, and between sheets.
Programming spreadsheets is *hard*. Anyone who knows a way around this,
I'd be grateful if they could tell me. However, it's still hateful since
this would be easy with a multidimensional array.
Mark.
--
#!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
print q{Mark Fowler, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx, http://twoshortplanks.com/};
Generated at 14:02 on 01 Jul 2004 by mariachi 0.52