An intensional 3-D spreadsheet and its implementation
Date
1986
Authors
Du, Weichang
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Abstract
The spreadsheet design presented in this thesis is based on the following observations. Existing spreadsheets are intended mainly for business and financial applications and they have user friendly interfaces but relatively poor programming and calculating abilities. This restricts their usefulness for problem-solving. Most existing spreadsheet languages are not based on sound programming techniques, and this makes the structure of spreadsheet programs not very logical or clear. The intensional spreadsheet, proposed in this thesis, is expected to be suitable for many applications, especially for scientific ones, and to be suitable for users at all levels including ones who already have programming experience. The intensional spreadsheet not only retains most of the features of existing spreadsheets but also adds new features.
The intensional spreadsheet introduces intensional logic into spreadsheet design. This allows the spreadsheet to be considered as an entity varying in three different dimensions instead of as a group of many individual cells. The intensional spreadsheet language is based on a high-level declarative language called Plane Lucid, which is a functional programming language with intensional operators. Intensional spreadsheet programs are evaluated using eduction - a tagged demand-driven computation model, which is shown to be a natural way to evaluate spreadsheet programs. On the application side, the availability of three dimensions, global variables, and user-defined functions provides users with powerful problem solving techniques.