working on a @styx-os.
 | ||
"accidentally-vengeful telco nerd"
—Tom Scott
platform sec researcher, OS dev, systems architect, composer; Other (please specify). vintage computer/electronics nut.
I am open to tag suggestions - if there is something you want me to tag on my posts, leave a comment. <3
@bark and i were tryna figure out how formulas worked under the hood, when we found some strange xla files on the install cd.
we couldn’t figure out how to edit them in excel — opening them in excel would just do nothing — but we were able to open them in libreoffice calc, and, well.
they use a formula-like programming language that can (what looks like) call into dlls, and they define ui strings in the spreadsheet?
tired: writing an assembler in microsoft excel
wired: using audacity as a hex editor
inspired: whatever the fuck this is
That looks a lot like Excel 4.0 macros. Before Excel had VBA, it had... this horrific thing, where Excel basically executed a column of macro cells linearly. Horrific side effects/upsides: they're Excel cells, so bring your own formatting! Want your assignments to be yellow? You can do that! Want to bold the important bit? You can do that too! Downsides: it's, uh, it's very much like unstructured BASIC but worse in every imaginable way. Flow control is just... jumping to another (maybe named) Excel cell. Single-step execution exists, at least, but here's no real debugger. Your data scope is basically infinite (all open workbooks, yes, but you also have the ability to create new workbooks and open existing ones), so any given routine can consume basically any data. The environment fosters total contempt for even basic code hygiene practices like separation of concerns.
