Portability and reuse of components for spreadsheet languages

Abstract

Spreadsheets are popular visual languages, since they are simple to use even for non-programmers. Yet, compared to other programming languages, spreadsheets provide 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.