On 8/4/2011 14:36, Warp wrote:
>    Oh, and another thing: You can do the work on a simple text file, meaning
> that if you wanted, you could later edit the file with any other program you
> like, rather than using a closed, proprietary file format that can only be
> opened and edited with MS Office.

You could do that with Word or Teco or VIM if you wanted to write the macro, 
sure.  I'll agree writing something like that in anything but Word (a la VBA 
or .NET) or elisp would be rather a PITA, since the macro languages of the 
others aren't what you'd call modular or easy to read. :-)

And emacs is pretty insular in its scripting language. You can't really talk 
to anything else from emacs' scripting language like you can with COM or 
REXX. You can't, for example, actually take that HTML you generated and 
display it formatted inline using an actual web browser, or take the 
formulas you used in the columns and store them in the table like with a 
spreadsheet. So there's strengths but also drawbacks of having a text-only 
format as well. The whole point of COM is to give you programmatic scripting 
access to the proprietary file formats.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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