calculate a 20+ digit field

The designers of JavaScript decided to make it magically convert between strings and numbers as needed, to make it easier to program in, and other decisions so people didn't get too many error message. Personally, I hate this, because we see so many problems caused by things which shouldn't be numbers being treated as numbers, and also spelling errors being treated as new variables. I like languages where you have to start by listing all the variables you will use, and what type of data they hold. Clearly, others hold different views.

There is something called "beginners depression" in programming, which is partly caused by very strict language rules. People learning Algol 68 would take weeks before they could write a program that would start to run. But I do wonder if we replace this by beginner's bafflement, where the code runs quickly but it takes weeks to get the result you wanted.

Use the format "None" for the fields.

This is what I have as the running script

var numberOfRows = 35;

//get the correlating fields contents, and then paste

function calc(rowNumber, colNumber, colName, tableColName) {

     for (i = 0; i < numberOfRows; i++) {

          var x = this.getField(colName + "." + (rowNumber + i)).value;

          this.getField(tableColName + " " + colNumber + "." + (rowNumber + i)).value = x;

     }

}

calc(0, 1, "Merchant Name", "Table Col");

calc(0, 2, "Transaction Amount","Table Col");

calc(0, 3, "Transaction Date", "Table Col");

calc(0, 4, "EFT Web Ref #", "Table Col");

calc(0, 5, "23 Digit ARN #", "Table Col");