On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 8:58 AM, Brian Schott <[email protected]> wrote: > Your comment about spreadsheets being scalar seems > to off the mark a little to me, because there are plenty of > spreadsheet formulae that refer to cell ranges, such as > Excel's SUM(A1:E4).
In that case, you are producing a scalar result. Granted, you are using a range expression but when you go examine that range, it is composed of 20 independent scalars which you have selected from a larger batch of scalars. If you want results which are larger than a scalar you either hand craft each element of the structure or you use copy and paste. [That said, the spreadsheet does have support explicitly designed to aid copy&past programming -- for example A1 vs. $A$1] > To me the bigger problem is making a cell aware of its own > geographic position relative to other cells: the whole cell > referencing thing. I think that that would be a bad idea, most of the time. > But thinking more about your reply, it occurs to me > that I should be more specific about the problem I have been > contemplating writing a small app to solve. The scenario is > 4 guys playing bridge for 5 hours or so, and changing > partners after every rubber. The spreadsheet at the > hyperlink below shows the scheme where columns A, B, C, and > D are used for each rubber and columns H, I, J, K, and L > contain running sums of the rubbers, and would typically be > a separate sheet, not columns on the same sheet with A, B, > C, and D. > > http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1PClHxSiRzbGytd3ExEn1RZOSvA16 > > Henry Rich's bridge scoring J program is very good > at computing the totals produced in rows 25 and higher from > inputs entered in rows 2 through 18, once the inputs are > translated into integers from strings. But how does one > produce a J program or a J/spreadsheet program combination > to accomplish this? (If the compactness of the outputs in > rows 25 and up are a special problem, I would be happy for > each of those rows to simply have one entry instead of some > having two entries, and other accommodations for > simplification would be fine.) At the moment, my idea of tying J to google spreadsheets is pure vapor. I have not been using tables/excel nor tables/tara but if I had an immediate project I imagine that I would be using one of them. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
