I usually refer to Excel as a zeroth order functional language, i.e.,
you can't define any functions. :)
(You can define functions if you do it in VBA or in an addin, but
that's not really Excel, imo.)
-- Lennart
On Apr 25, 2007, at 04:00 , Tony Morris wrote:
In a debate I proposed "Excel is a functional language". It was
refuted
and I'd like to know what some of you clever Haskellers might think :)
My opposition proposed (after some "weeding out") that there is a
distinction between Excel, the application, the GUI and Excel, the
language (which we eventually agreed (I think) manifested itself as a
.xls file). Similarly, VB is both a language and a development
environment and referring to VB is a potential ambiguity. I disagree
with this analogy on the grounds that the very definition of Excel
(proposed by Microsoft) makes no distinction. Further, it is
impossible
to draw a boundary around one and not the other.
I also pointed to the paper by Simon Peyton-Jones titled,
"Improving the
world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in
Excel", which quite clearly refers to Excel as a [popular] functional
language.
The debate started when I referred to the fact that financial
institutions change their functional language from Excel to something
like OCaml or Haskell. Of course, there is no doubting that these
companies can replace their entire use of Excel with a functional
language, which I think is almost enough to fully support my position
(emphasis on "almost").
--
Tony Morris
http://tmorris.net/
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