Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> So... would it for example be possible to write some gizmo that enables 
> you to insert a mathematical formula into a Word document without Word 
> crashing? (Or an organisation chart, for that matter?)

Possible, yes. That's exactly one of the sorts of things it's good for.

> Could you write a plugin for Excel that draws some new kind of chart? 

Yep.

> maybe be able to write macros in Haskell instead of VisualBasic? (You 
> know how normally you can write a macro in VB and then use it as a 
> normal function in cells of the spreadsheet? Well, what if you wanted to 
> use Haskell instead? Is that possible, technically?)

I would expect so. It depends what Excel exposes.0

>> You use it to do all the sorts of things you use IPC for (pipes, 
>> sockets, etc) in Linux land.
> 
> When I develop things that have to talk to each other, I generally just 
> use TCP. (Because almost all programming languages know how to do it. As 
> a somewhat nice side effect, it also makes it possible to run components 
> on seperate machines.) I have no idea what the overhead is though.

There's certainly the serialization overhead.

> (Before now I've written some code in one programming language, then had 
> it use TCP to talk to a Tcl script to provide a front-end. Damn, if only 
> there was 1 programming language that had *all* the features I need...)

Yah. That's what I'm doing right now, to wrap up some buggy C++ code 
that doesn't bother to deallocate resources when something fails. :)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

Post a reply to this message