Re: Scripting in Gnome

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 18:43, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 15:22 -0800, Rob Adams wrote:
> > It'd be awesome if gnumeric could become infected by excel macro
> > viruses.
> 
> All the other kids think it's cool.  ;-)
> 
> I'm sure some of the more brain-dead issues could be worked around.  I.
> e., disabling any kind of I/O (does excel allow that?) and such.  Secure
> embedded scripts are a possibility, it's just that most vendors botch
> them up like a hill billy in Congress.  (No, I swear, that wasn't a jab
> at Bush.)

Python allows for a restricted execution state in which you can tell the
interpreter what functionality you do not wish to be available to the
script.  So if the VB was run in a python environment you could do it
safely.  I think this is a valid application in terms of compatibility
but in the future compatibility will most likely come in the form of
Mono (and if you think Microsoft won't break compatibility to do this,
realize that VB has gone through many incompatible changes in its
lifetime which made it a hard language to support).  So all in all it is
cool if Jamie can pull it off.  But as for a standard scripting language
for Gnome, VB definitely should not be it.  On the desktop, distros
should be taking care of the language dependencies and perhaps we will
have Parrot (haha) to unify things with much less controversy than Mono
at some point. 

--
J5

> 
> > 
> > -Rob
> > 
> > On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 14:46, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > > On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 10:15:12PM +0000, jamie wrote:
> > > 
> > > Amen brother !
> > > If you write it we will use it.  In Gnumeric we could dearly use
> > > something to interpret vba.  I've had two possibilities in mind for
> > > a while now.
> > > 
> > > 1) Pray that vb.net is 'close enough' to be automapped from vba
> > > 2) extract the p-code (pre parsed tokens) in the macros in office
> > >    files and translate that to python.  I'm leaning towards this
> > >    just now.  There is code to extract vba source code from ms
> > >    office files, and I've got some docs on the p-code but the
> > >    extraction is still largely a research project.
> > > 
> > > The anti-virus folk are interested in p-code extraction too.
> > > Although I doubt they want to execute it :-)
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