Feasibility of system() plugin?

[Leigh Smith <leigh tomandandy com>]

I've just got up to speed on gnumeric on MacOS X after converting some 
spreadsheets from sc. I'm considering writing a gnumeric plug-in to suit my 
needs, but wanted to check that the functionality isn't already in gnumeric 
and I've somehow missed it.

I'd like to retrieve market data and have the share prices appear in cells 
that can then be used for calculations. Recalculating the sheet would cause 
new values to be fetched.

The easiest way I can see that would have some value to everyone else would 
be to implement a function SYSTEM() that would take a string of the command 
to be executed and return a numeric value. Therefore =SYSTEM("get_shares 
ORCL")
would evaluate to the current share price. get_shares is just a shell 
script I have that can grab the values using curl and print the share price 
on stdout and do some caching of data fetches.

If I'm not already reproducing a function that exists (I don't want to just 
import a CSV file each time the data changes), I'm happy to write a plugin,
 (the plugin API looks pretty straightforward) and I'll contribute it back.
 Obviously I could do this via the Python plugin, but it seems a bit of 
overkill to use python just to execute an external command. Strictly 
speaking I could define a number of functions that return different formats 
of data, but the one that scans the output for the first float seems the 
most useful initially.

Thoughts?
--
Leigh Smith
tomandandy
mailto:leigh tomandandy com
http://www.tomandandy.com