IEEE 2002 Symposium on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'02)
Portability and Reuse of Components for Spreadsheet Languages
Arlington, Virginia, USA
September 03-September 06
ISBN: 0-7695-1644-0
Spreadsheets are popular visual languages, since they are simple to use even for non-programmers. Yet, compared to other programming languages, spreadsheets provide a still rather limited support for portability and reuse of components. The new language Wizcell provides an integrated modularity concept including fine-granular referencing, interface definitions based on explicit input and output cells, and Model-View-Controller modularity. These concepts facilitate the reuse of components by copy/paste operations or by dragging and dropping elements to and from user-configurable palettes with minimal formula changes. A platform-independent model, which can be executed by a portable virtual machine, enhances portability. Such a model may be accompanied by several possibly platform-dependent views to accommodate different environments.