Implementing function spreadsheets

A large amount of end-user development is done with spreadsheets. The spreadsheet metaphor is attractive because it is visual and accommodates interactive experimentation, but as observed by Peyton Jones, Blackwell and Burnett, the spreadsheet metaphor does not admit even the most basic abstraction: that of turning an expression into a named function. Hence they proposed a way to define a function in terms of a worksheet with designated input and output cells; we shall call it a function sheet. The goal of our work is to develop implementations of function sheets and study their application to realistic examples. Therefore, we are also developing a simple yet comprehensive spreadsheet core implementation for experimentation with this technology. Here we report briefly on our experiments with function sheets as well as other uses of our spreadsheet core implementation.