Abstract

. The spreadsheet is one of the most successful computer applications. This popularity derives from an intuitive user interface which both closely mimics traditional bookkeeping and allows non-programmers to develop simple numerical applications. Unfortunately, the current user interface is frustrating and limiting: we believe that the computational model can be simplified to improve usability for non-programmers, extended to provide additional functionality, redesigned to facilitate reuse (to improve performance and integrity), and embedded in an environment which supports a spreadsheet inheritance hierarchy. We propose a new spreadsheet paradigm which incorporates many functional programming features such as higher-order functions, a strong type system, curried partial applications, referential transparency and lazy evaluation. It also incorporates many object-oriented programming features such as a class hierarchy, inheritance, overloading, overriding, subsumption, and dynamic desp...

Citations