Purpose: to discuss what a spreadsheet is, and to point to some of the Tcl/Tk examples of this construct.
What is a spreadsheet? A spreadsheet in the physical world is a piece of paper with a grid of boxes drawn on it, used to attempt to convey in some fashion a relationship between at least two vectors of information. These vectors are typically referred to as rows and columns of data, and the basic unit of information for the spreadsheet, the intersection of a row and column, is a cell of data.
For instance, the vectors may represent columns of months/weeks/days/hours and rows of data (money spent, sales achieved per individual, etc.).
Electronically, one of the early spreadsheets was Visicalc. It provided more than just an input grid for one to type in numbers and words. It also provided the means to associate calculations (known as formula) to specific cells, and even link ranges of cells to a specific formula.
Several spreadsheets coded in Tcl are publicly available:
Other spreadsheets with Tcl associations include:
AM The way spreadsheets work (with formulae for a cell that reference other cells) made me think of developing a different kind of programming: Demand-driven computation