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Comment by jkaptur | Hacker News Reader

Very cool ideas. I'm surprised that the article didn't mention R1C1 mode [0], which seems to be a big step towards the "intensional" view of a formula.

0. https://bettersolutions.com/excel/formulas/cell-references-a....

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I was thinking that the article overall felt bit out of touch with what Excel does these days, then I checked the date on the date on the linked original IEEE article and its from 1990, 30 years ago. No wonder it is bit difficult to place in modern context. "A while back" indeed.

R1C1 is even older still. It was first released in 1982 as the the cell addressing for Microsoft Multiplan (so we are talking pre-Excel).

Microsoft only later adopted A1 formulas to fall in line with VisCal and Lotus 1-2-3.

I had the same thought -- it seems like many of these ideas overlap heavily with R1C1 mode, which is already how Excel internally manages formula copy-paste.

Joel Spolsky explaining how it works: https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=567

Seems the author of the article has now addressed this:

> It’s been pointed out that you can get something close to this with R1C1 notation. R[-2]C is the cell two columns to the left on the same row. This notation is not as general; for example we can write left(F+left F).

I'd argue it's more readable too.

Yeah. Here's the fibonacci example in a column:

    0
    1
    =R[-2]C+R[-1]C
    =R[-2]C+R[-1]C
    =R[-2]C+R[-1]C
    =R[-2]C+R[-1]C

(at least, how Libre Office Calc shows it)

Yes, spreadsheets use relative references and transform them to absolute references as a display format.

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