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The Excel Formula Language Is Now Turing-Complete (infoq.com)
1 point by hatmatrix on Aug 6, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


Excel has long been Turing Complete.

That is, many people have written Game of Life implementations in Excel. (Eg, https://github.com/Rich5/Excel-Game-of-Life ), and GoL is Turing Complete ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life ).

Being able to create and call recursively defined functions is not a pre-requisite for Turing Completeness.

For those who want to read the underlying MS product announcement: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing... .


beware: the GOL implemented in https://github.com/Rich5/Excel-Game-of-Life uses VBA and not Excel formulas


Indeed, I can't find a non-VBA GoL implementation for Excel.




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