From: Mike Stephens <rubfor@...>
Date: 2011-04-04T03:44:02+09:00
Subject: Why should I be a programmer, to program?

Phillip Gawlowski wrote in post #990664:

> Anecdote:
> My EE prof used Excel to invert a matrix. Took about 30 minutes, and
> was far from obvious (I forgot how it was done, since it was
> definitely something Excel wasn't designed to do), when a specialized
> tool (Maple in this case), did the same job in one line of code,
> following the mathematical notation (M_inverse := M^-1).

Would that remark still apply if Excel had - let's say - a function
MINVERSE() - a similar single line of code?

Well, interestingly, I do believe it does.

Have a look at eg
http://www.chem.mtu.edu/~tbco/cm3450/Excel_Array_Formulas.pdf

I suspect people don't realise what power Excel has, because hardly
anyone talks about it. They either talk about everyday corporate number
crunching or conventional programming lnaguages. Few people think about
taking Excel's components and mixing them together to solve
simultanaeous linear equations.

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