On Mon, Jul 5, 2021 at 10:14 AM Eric S Fraga <e.fr...@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> Sorry; I cannot help you directly. > > My rule of thumb is that if formulas are getting too complex to > understand/recall clearly, it's time to use a proper programming > language instead. The nice thing about org is you can have tables as > inputs to and outputs of src blocks... > > My papers often have awk source blocks that process tables to generate > statistics for some (numerical) experiments. > > Spreadsheets, org tables being an example of such, are brilliant tools > for simple calculations but are pretty much "write only programming > languages". > I had never heard of using an org table as input into a source block. That's really interesting. The OP also poses an interesting idea that I have occasionally wanted. I have generally accomplished this by simply including the documentation above or below the table. In other words just having human text around it that says 'This =formula= bit is because of X'. But the idea of a multiline TBLFM syntax seems to be already be almost supported. I was mildly shocked to find that this mostly works ``` |---+---| | a | 1 | | b | 3 | |---+---| | | 4 | #+TBLFM: @2$2=@-1*3 #+TBLFM: @3$2=vsum(@I..II) ``` Note that I don't need the usual `::` separation between formulas. Where it breaks down is that I can't seem to reevaluate the whole table's formula by whacking `C-u C-c C-c` anymore and, obviously, there's no syntax for adding comments. Also I doubt that I'd be able to use any of org's keys for editing formulas. I wonder how hard it would be to extend org's understanding of the TBLFM to allow for this kind of syntax. Once you had it then adding a comment character to it should be very simple. -- In Christ, Timmy V. https://blog.twonegatives.com http://five.sentenc.es
