Re: strings in gnumeric / awk / etc.

["Uri David Akavia" <uridavid akavia gmail com>]

On 1/16/07, Leonard Mada <discoleo gmx net> wrote:
> gawk has many advantages and I may point another two:
> - it is easy and simple, and very very fast (both to write and execute -
> even on huge datasets)
> - the code is structured and visible, so it is easy to understand what
> it does (this is NOT always the case when you write complex formulas in
> the spreadsheet)
>
> I hope these are enough reasons to implement a simple menu-entry in
> gnumeric that runs awk/gawk scripts.

I hope they aren't.
While these are good reasons, they don't seem good enough. Currently, I haven't
heard of a proposed method that would actually have some security limitations.

In order to keep security, you would need to write a gawk plugin for
Gnumeric, that can run a limited version of gawk. Otherwise, you're
running arbitrary scripts, without any limitations. While this might
be convenient for you, I don't see an argument that it would be good
in general.

I hope that the developers implement this the RIGHT way, if they
implement something like this at all.

Yours,

Uri David Akavia