[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
206 Egan  Hall, Northeastern University
    (building 60 on http://www.campusmap.neu.edu/)  
1030-1230

XeLda: Unit-checker for spreadsheets

Tudor Antoniu
Brown University

XeLda is a unit-checker for Excel spreadsheets.  When units are
misused or derived units clash with unit annotations, XeLda flags
errors.  Specifically, it highlights the offending cells and allows
the user to draw source arrows for debugging.  Our tool is sensitive
to the intracicies of Excel spreadsheets, and can handle tables,
matrices, and even circular references.  Our approach draws on the
idea of unit inference for programming languages developed by
Goubault, Kennedy, Wand, and others.  XeLda integrates smoothly with
Excel by accessing its COM interfaces from PLT Scheme.  Our technology
can detect errors in the dimensional consistency of some off-the-shelf
scientific spreadsheets.


Upcoming presentations:

Open (any volunteers??)

--Mitch