You may have no­ticed no posts about Stupid­Sheet for about a week.

Well, I ran in­to the lim­i­ta­tions of the for­mu­la pars­er I was do­ing us­ing Ape­ri­ot. I just could­n't make it parse this:

A1=IF(A2=B2,1,0)

So, I spent the next week try­ing one pars­ing pack­age for Python a day un­til I could find one I un­der­stood and could make it parse that ex­am­ple.

I must say it was ed­u­ca­tion­al.

So, now the pars­er is based on PLY which is pret­ty much Lex+Y­ACC with a (s­light­ly more) python­ic syn­tax, and it work­s.

Yes, it's a bit hard­er, but by try­ing to do things sim­ply I was lim­it­ing my­self too much, and, per­haps un­der­es­ti­mat­ing my­self.

I am a pret­ty smart guy, there is no rea­son I can't un­der­stand these things.

... ask­ing the pres­i­dent of Kaza­khstan how to patch it un­der Free­BSD (which I must con­fess I have no idea, un­less you an­swer "us­ing patch"?).

More in­fo here.

I was able to hack a bit at Stupid­Sheet this morn­ing, and there are some re­al ad­vances.

In fac­t, it's a bare­ly func­tion­al spread­sheet al­ready! Hel­l, it has at least one fea­ture OOcalc lack­s, and one both OOcalc and KSpread missed.

Check it out in this video (9.5M­B):

Sor­ry, dead file

Sor­ry if the au­dio is out of sync and/or too low. And you prob­a­bly can't stream it, you need to down­load it first. And maybe it will 404 on you. If that's the case, wait a few min­utes and in­sist.

For my spread­sheet pro­jec­t, I had to re­do some­thing I had for­got­ten about: cell dis­place­men­t. I did that once when the for­mu­la lan­guage was python.

At the time, I parsed the python us­ing the to­k­enize mod­ule and Ka-Ping Yee's re­gur­gi­tate.

Python->­To­ken­s->Dis­place cell­s->re­gur­gi­tate->Python

Since I have lots of oth­er things to do, I de­cid­ed to do it the same way, and wrote the equiv­a­lent of re­gur­gi­tate for Trax­ter, my for­mu­la lan­guage.

It turns out it was not re­al­ly hard, but I had to re­do parts of the pars­er so it kept more in­for­ma­tion about the source.

Af­ter that it was sim­ple, you see, Trax­ter com­piles to Python. That means all I had to do was an­oth­er (very sim­i­lar) back­end, and there it is, a Trax­ter-­to-­Trax­ter com­pil­er. Or de­com­pil­er. Or some­thing. And rel­a­tive cell ref­er­ences are work­ing again (and now with the right syn­tax).

It promis­es:

• Na­­tive look&feel for your apps on all ma­jor plat­­forms

• Works for graph­i­­cal and ter­mi­­nal apps

• Open Source

• Low over­­head

• Uni­ver­sal bi­­na­ries that work on Win­­dows, Mac and Lin­ux

Seems too good to be true, but it is sup­posed to be re­leased next month.

• The we­b­site

• The press re­lease

• The videos

• The whitepa­per (which reads most­­ly like an ad)