[Haskell-cafe] representing spreadsheets

[Stephen Tetley]

Hi Eric

A spreadsheet is an indexed / tabular structure which doesn't map well
to Haskell's built-in way of defining data - algebraic types - which
are trees via sums and products.

Wolfram Kahl has a paper on modelling tables in Haskell "Compositional
Syntax and Semantics of Tables" which might be interesting / useful:
tables look like they have strong similarities to spreadsheets and the
implementation is included in the appendix.

Unfortunately the code is very complicated - I say this intending no
criticism or judgement of Wolfram's work, just that it takes a lot of
type system power to get over the representation mismatch between
trees and tables.

Wolfram Kahl - Compositional Syntax and Semantics of Tables
http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/sqrl/papers/sqrl15.pdf


Best wishes

Stephen