points by whizzter 4 days ago | 0 comments
What parts are Python and how does one know where the classic Spreadsheet functionality ends and Python starts ?
[–] dsagal 4 days ago
[–] whizzter 3 days ago
Oh, so this is something Grist specific rather than something inherited from Excel? (I remember reading sometime back that MS was replacing VBA with Python)
[–] librasteve 4 days ago
that’s why https://omasheet.org has its own DSL. that said it’s no doubt got some wrinkles so I’ll be reviewing all the comments on this hn post very carefully
[–] whizzter 3 days ago
Not entirely uninteresting, wrote some thoughts in your main comment thread.
E.g. UPPER($A) is just a function that calls $A.upper(). And $A is just syntactic sugar over rec.A.
PREVIOUS() is only special in that it automatically creates an index, which is important for efficiency. But generally you can look up a set of records and write multi-line Python code to do whatever you want with it and return a value. And it all runs in a sandbox with no access to anything except this document's data.