Abstract
We give an operational semantics for the evaluation of spreadsheets, including sheet-defined and built-in numeric functions in the Funcalc spreadsheet platform. The semantics allows for different implementations and we discuss sheet-defined functions implemented using both interpretation and run-time code generation. The semantics specifies the expected result of a computation, also considering non-deterministic functions, independently of an evaluation mechanism. It can be extended to include the cost of formula evaluation for a cost analysis e.g. for use in parallelization of computations. An interesting future direction is to investigate experimentally how close our semantics is to that of major spreadsheet implementations.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 100960 |
Journal | Journal of Computer Languages |
Volume | 57 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISSN | 2590-1184 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Mar 2020 |
Keywords
- Spreadsheet
- Semantics
- Funcalc
- Sheet-defined function
- Recalculation