Not just in spreadsheets either! We had fun when we were writing Lotus Notes document database applications and discovered that evaling big vectors in Lotus formula language instead of looping over them in LotusScript actually improved performance. And noticeably so.

If you had for some reason a long list of numbers you wanted to multiply, pair by pair, with some equally long list of numbers, you could:

Set doc = db.CreateDocument() doc.LeftList = leftArray doc.RightList = rightArray multipliedArray = Evaluate({LeftList * RightList}, doc)

Much faster than looping over them in LotusScript!

{} is LotusScript's neat string literal syntax that makes it easy for you to put the quotes you need inside your strings, so it's what you'd generally use for string literals when writing formulas. I don't know if normal Visual Basic had that syntax, otherwise LotusScript was pretty much Visual Basic.

There were also several @functions that were faster than their LotusScript analogues, because the LS methods would just pull in too much data and populate a lot of objects:

www.ibm.com/developerworks/lot…

#LotusScript #LotusNotes #LotusDomino

Now #HCLNotes and #HCLDomino I hear. Don't know if they still have LotusScript in v11, or if it's all Java these days. Java became available in v4.6 already, 22 years ago or so. It was faster than LotusScript for many things, and by Lotus Notes 5.0 there were even some things you could only do in Java, but the tooling was still awkward at the time compared to the actually very good LotusScript/Notes integration, so we mostly stayed in LotusScript.