Slashdot: With New User-Defined Functions, Microsoft Excel is Now Turing Complete

With New User-Defined Functions, Microsoft Excel is Now Turing Complete
Published on January 31, 2021 at 08:04AM
Visual Studio Magazine reports: Microsoft, which calls its Excel spreadsheet a programming language, reports that an effort called LAMBDA to make it even more of a programming language is paying off, recently being deemed Turing complete. Being Turing complete is the litmus test of a full-fledged programming language, marking the ability to imitate a Turing machine. According to one definition, that means, "A programming language is Turing complete if you can implement any possible algorithm with it." And that's exactly what LAMBDA can now do. "You can now, in principle, write any computation in the Excel formula language," said Microsoft researchers in a Jan. 25 blog post. To get there, researchers at the Calc Intelligence project addressed two shortcomings to the LAMBDA project, which is conducted in coordination with the Excel team and which was first announced early last month. They are: - The Excel formula language supported only scalar values like numbers, strings and Booleans - It didn't let users define new functions.... "Moreover, even if it takes greater skill and knowledge to author a lambda, it takes no extra skill to call it," researchers said. "LAMBDA allows skilled authors to extend Excel with application-domain-specific functions that appear seamlessly part of Excel to their colleagues, who simply call them. "It will be interesting to see how users continue to experiment with and apply not only LAMBDA but also data types and dynamic arrays. We believe these new functional programming features will transform how people make decisions with Excel." And there is certainly a large audience of both programmers and coders, as Microsoft claims "Excel formulas are written by an order of magnitude more users than all the C, C++, C#, Java, and Python programmers in the world combined." Towards the end the article points out that right now to actually use the new feature, "you have to be a member of the Insiders: Beta program."

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