Tamgucalc: A spreadsheet in character mode with Lisp formulas | Hacker News Reader

Tamgucalc: A spreadsheet in character mode with Lisp formulas

github.com

74 pointsclauderoux22 comments

Cool project for sure, but it does provoke the obligatory Emacs org-mode as a spreadsheet plug. [1]

I use it often, mostly for my D&D character sheet, but occasionally for work.

Works the same in terminal or GUI, with elisp formula evaluation (including Emacs calc functions), column types, table relationships, and, with org-babel, access to other languages and their libraries (for plotting, etc.) Can even read from DB into an org table and then manipulate data and write back.

[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro...

Beside Calc and elisp, you can use almost any other programming language for formula calculations as well [1], which makes it extremely powerful.

[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html#spread...

Heh, not just calc and org, there's several dedicated spreadsheet modes, too.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SpreadSheet

Of course, you are right. However, tamgucalc launches instantly in your terminal, which is not always the case for emacs, which is sometimes a bit to slow.

Not so. Emacsen run server-client. Instantaneous.

At first glance, it seems like Lisp is inappropriate for spreadsheets: the syntax is simply too verbose and heavy. But cool project, I've always wanted to make a terminal spreadsheet app. Maybe with some custom APL-like language. Now that would be cool!

The 'first' spreadsheet was a terminal app, and also the 'killer app' for the PC : Lotus 1-2-3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3

The first spreadsheet app was VisiCalc.

Ironically the second, and quite visible paragraph of the 1-2-3 article mentions VisiCalc as first.

I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.

Ok all drama aside I can't help feeling like LISP is the best language you could have in this context because it's verbose, unambiguous, highly encapsulated and old school not to mention hardcore.

Anyone using a spreadsheet in emacs would be well versed in this sort of paradigm and I personally love lisp because it's how we cut our teeth in functional programming in university.

Not to mention it's perfectly suited to list processing..

I fully agree with you. When you see how cumbersome Excel formulas can be when you want to mix different operators together, with their "(",";" and so on and so forth. I wonder how you can say that Lisp is too verbose for this task.

Furthermore, this spreadsheet is fully "libre", you can modify it and transform it according to your needs. There is also the possibility to write "regular formulas", which are more similar to what people are used to.

You might be interested in mesh [1], which is sort of what you're angling at. The creator did a video explaining it [2].

  [1] https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh
  [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEG9pFNYBCI&t=499s

Yep. JavaScript can also work as a formula language (per the Mesh JS prototype), but APL family languages such as k are much more ergonomic - and 'punchy' - in a spreadsheet context.

Seems interesting. I was curious about how mouse support was retrofitted into the app but discovered that the commit messages are unfortunately absolutely useless for seeing recent changes. They’re all “update xxx.cpp” or just “bug” [sic].

please accept my apologies, I should be more verbose in my comments. The whole implementation is in tamgusys.cxx. See inmouse and outmouse for more details. Basically, inmouse activates the mouse catching events, which are sent through getchar. Once, the mouse has been activated, you can use some primitives mouedown1 our mouseup, which takes as input the string returned by getchar and returns the x,y coordinates

No worries, thanks for taking the time to explain! I find commit messages help “future me” more than anyone else, I never regret the time it takes to flesh them out (and tend to regret when I don’t).

Actually, I have another private GitHub, where I do most of my experiments and which is bit more informative. When my code executes, I then push it on the official one, hence the lack of comments.

By the way, I have updated tamgusys.h to integrate mouse support in Windows consoles...

Interesting. On a somewhat related note, I wonder how much work it would be to port scheme in a grid to racket, or somehow get it working on modern distros/os' (it's been abandoned for a while, and uses a ui toolkit that's been abandoned too):

http://siag.nu/siag/

The ftp link on the front page for the sources is unresponsive (at least on Firefox). The sources can be found at http://siag.nu/pub/siag/

Right, for the adventurous - I did manage to build it at one time or another - possibly on Debian 4 or 5 or so.

Part of the problem is libXawM (Athena widgets):

http://siag.nu/pub/siag/binaries/linux/siag-ldd

I'm not sure if libXawM is a variant of libXaw or an extension... But apparently libXaw lives at:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxaw

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