"Tony Tanzillo" wrote...
> My objection to the kludge-o-rama approach that got me
> started in this, is that it embraces the unsound practice
> of directly exposing private member variables (or global
> LISP variables) to another API. Regardless of whether you
> are passing data between LISP and VBA, or not, you don't
> do it by attempting to directly manipulate variables in one
> environment from another. Instead, you define a formal
> interface consisting of functions that can be called from
> one environment, to manipulate data in the other.
>
Tony,
Thank you for taking the time to share this. It is quite helpful, but I am
having a hard time understanding how having a formal interface in lisp is
any different than having an interface in VBA that utilizes the same
VL.Application as yours..... I mean, what Frank put together is by no means
any rocket science type code, but rather a compilation of some useful
functions that help poor sods, like I once was, to make the transition from
lisp to VB(A). And those functions don't look much different than what is in
your code. I found the VLAX class to be both useful AND educational......I
learned that I didn't want to be passing data back and forth, although I
could if I needed to. I have long since stopped trying to do this, but the
newcomers need something to help them along (otherwise they wouldn't of
asked the question).
I still haven't gotten to the VB part, as that route costs money that I
can't justify spending for the mods I currently write. But that doesn't mean
that I don't want to learn the proper way to do things, it's just that
sometimes we need a crutch to get past the falling down we do in the pursuit
of learning.
Thanks again,
Jeff
