Abstract

It has been claimed that recent developments in the research on the efficiency of code generation and on graphical input/output interfacing have made it possible to use a functional language to write efficient programs that can compete with industrial applications written in a traditional imperative language. As one of the early steps in verifying this claim, this paper describes a first attempt to implement a spreadsheet in a lazy, purely functional language. An interesting aspect of the design is that the language with which the user specifies the relations between the cells of the spreadsheet is itself a lazy, purely functional and higher order language as well, and not some special dedicated spreadsheet language. Another interesting aspect of the design is that the spreadsheet incorporates symbolic reduction and normalisation of symbolic expressions (including equations). This introduces the possibility of asking the system to prove equality of symbolic cell expressions: a property...

Citations