Norm Byers wrote:
Dear Sirs,
Long ago, in a galaxy far away... I was the developer of the Saturn-Calc
Spreadsheet application for the PDP-11 (RT-11,TSX,RSX,RSTS O/S), VAX (VMS),
and PC (DOS only). Though a couple of $million worth were sold it met its
demise with the demise of DEC and the rise of Excel, it nonetheless had some
computing capabilities I long for today.
The most significant of these capabilities were provided by several
spreadsheet functions. I do not know if your parser and execute engine would
be capable of providing these but I'd like to mention them to you:
1) PUTR(expression, range,range...)
This function allowed you to evaluate the provided 'expression' once for
each cell in the ranges, with the result being put in the cell being
evaluated. The result was the sum of all evaluated results.
Changing other cells from the calculation (execution) of a function
doesn't fit well with the current implementation. It could be done
asynchronously (similar to the STYLE function), but that would of course
create its own problems.
The closest thing we have is array formulas with multiple-cell results,
where one cell's recalculation computes the complete result, and the
other cells just reference it. But the whole array layout is created
once, when the formula is entered, and not modified automatically
afterwards.
2) ADDVAL( expression, range,range)
Similar to the above, but simply returned the sum of the individual
expression evaluations.
Array formulas can work in a similar way, as in =SUM(A2:A4*B2:B4),
entered as an array formula (shift-ctrl-enter).
3) EROW() and ECOL() - these were the key to the above functions. With each
cell evaluated, these would change to represent the cell reference being
evaluated from the ranges in PUTR and ADDVAL. You could then use these for
additional computed cell references.
Unless you want to do strange tricks, the possibilities of array
formulas may again be sufficient.
I also had extremely easy to create and use user defined function capability
that allowed simply defining a parameterized function within any (usually
named) cell (generally hidden), that didn't require going into a separate
macro language. I also allowed the specification of a user library that was
simply a separate user defined spreadsheet that held these functions within
named cells. Local Functions were referenced as: $A$1(parameters), or name:
$MyFunction(...), and library functions were referenced as
$$MyFunction(...).
That sounds somewhat easier, but a bit arcane from a user interface
point of view. Perhaps it would be better to extend named ranges (which
are in fact named expressions), so they can pe parametrized.
Anyhow, just my two cents worth for something to consider. If I ever have
the time I might myself investigate if its possible to add such to the
OpenOffice calc product.
I don't think that we will find the time to add such features in the
near future. If you want to look into them and have further questions,
just ask on the list.
Niklas
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