A big thank you to all of you, for all your interventions. Still receive my apologies for the slowness of my present answer. I had prepared it (always first written in French, but "RPG" went before to ... basically say what I think ... Difficult, after that, to take up my own thread, let alone in a language with which I still struggle as much... So, I will respond to the points of view which, in my opinion, require refinements but with which it is understood that I generally agree.
Totally agree with you that the "macro reflex" is probably too present in many people. But I still believe that my own level makes me able to judge whether it is good or not, to use programming and languages to achieve my ends. If I want to get
a 18th century graphic like this (each stroke is a pipe’s organ diameter), I know how to calculate it (geometrically) in
Calc. As for printing, at scale, it turns out that the programmers of Open/LibreOffice did not think of this specific case... But the modules of the suite know very well how to talk to each other, via macro. So I stop crying about the limitation (!) of the charts in
Calc which do not provide for the organological graphs of the 18th century (a scandal, admit it) and I am doing my little macro which is fine. The API offers me, however, a plethora of extremely complex, varied solutions, even with only
Basic!
And that is the point that lets me to underline that I am still surprised that something as simple as listing the files in a directory according to a given pattern is not documented, precisely in the API, precisely because SFA does things that there are quite complex (for example, read and write a binary file), while a function in use for the less
Rock'n Roll which dates from the Middle Ages and which has not yet burned with the framework of
Notre-Dame of Paris, still works to this day. I am always very respectful of old and historic things. But still recognize that a directory file list is not the pinnacle of complexity that needs to be carved with an ax. We can, sometimes, find effective the electric planer...
I absolutely don't think
Python is difficult to learn. I, for my part, started to dive into it, probably pushed even further by
Villeroy, who started off on this particular subject, probably a little too much offten, but with reasons whose foundations it would be difficult to deny.
I had started studying VBA from the (glorious) time of M$-Excel in version 5. Micro$oft changed its language after this version to the one still valid today. But in the meantime, the versions of the two Basics had become incompatible. I am not the type to appreciate this type of jokes, especially to serve a trading system. When OpenOffice was released and I realized it was providing macros, I was obviously very happy. I have never regretted my choices to have studied this API and even a forum thread like this, allows me, again, to confirm it.
Because your insistence made me delve into "
Option VBASupport 1" since it allows to change the behavior of the "
like" operator which becomes case sensitive. Above all, I took the time to put all of this in the context of a script, quite long, that I am writing. And there, it is very funny: "
Option VBASupport 1" causes me errors where there is none if the Option is absent. Like you, I am always as scrupulously as possible the API (from LibreOffice). On the other hand, it is obviously not an option to have to adapt to the whims of a support that I do not need. "
VBASupport" seems to me to be a bad choice; simply because the two philosophies are diametrically opposed, also because I find it difficult to imagine a correct compatibility of a system which I have already experienced that it can change at all, without the slightest regard for its users. To devote energy and weighing the number of its libraries, it is obviously
Python which, this time, is no longer an option.
I started this thread humorously (well, I think
) knowing from the start my first example worked. But I do not sign this thread as "
Solved"; because I cannot be convinced that the creators of an API, as complex as the one we are dealing with here, may not have thought of this Pattern’s case. It’s too huge, especially when a prehistoric tool is capable of it.
A huge thank you, too, to
Jeje and his regular expressions ideas that can be used in any situation other than this.