This is an idea for a extension of Markdown tables so they may be (kinda) used as spreadsheets.
Markdown tables currently look like this:
| name | age | job |
|--------|-----|-----------|
| Mira | 27 | Superhero |
| Pietro | 24 | Clown |
| Flora | 18 | Singer |The idea is to include more lines below the table describing new columns that will be calculated using a provided formula using whatever programming language is best suited.
The extension lines will start with a colon :, followed by the new
column name, followed by an equals sign =, and finally the equation for this
new column.
An example of the proposed syntax is the following with Javascript as scripting language:
| name | age | job |
|--------|-----|-----------|
| Mira | 27 | Superhero |
| Pietro | 24 | Clown |
| Flora | 18 | Singer |
: title = (t, r, i) => `${r["name"]}, the ${r["job"]}`This should create a new column called title using the given function as a
rule. This function should have 3 parameters: t is the whole table, r is the
current row, and i is the index of the current row.
Extending this table should yield this result:
| name | age | job | title |
|--------|-----|-----------|---------------------|
| Mira | 27 | Superhero | Mira, the Superhero |
| Pietro | 24 | Clown | Pietro, the Clown |
| Flora | 18 | Singer | Flora, the Singer |This same syntax could work, for example, with Python:
| name | age | job |
|--------|-----|-----------|
| Mira | 27 | Superhero |
| Pietro | 24 | Clown |
| Flora | 18 | Singer |
: title = lambda t, r, i: "{}, the {}".format(r["name"], r["job"])The idea is to keep this language agnostic so the designers can use the best language depending on the situation.