Work in progress - spreadsheet implementation programming project course

Abstract

Development of a course and textbook focusing on implementation of a spreadsheet program is proposed. The semester-long course will be suitable as a senior elective or graduate course for students with a background in C programming, Unix, and data structures. It will bring together aspects of compiler construction, parser design using Flex and Bison, parse trees, linked lists, function tables, function callbacks, symbol tables, and functional programming. The emphasis will be on the computational internals, so the spreadsheet will operate in ldquobatchrdquo mode, with simple text output, and a separate backend processor will be used to create a web-based GUI.