Hi Tony, I think Lennart said it best with "Excel is a zero-order functional language" - a functional language in which you can't define functions. Another way of putting that is that it is a functional language, but a really bad one (from a functional'ness perspective).
Thanks Neil On 4/25/07, Tony Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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/ _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
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