A Comparison Between SISAL 1.2 and Funcalc

The purpose of this technical report is to evaluate the expressiveness of Funcalc by translating programs written in the Streams and Iteration in a Single Assignment Language (SISAL) programming language to Funcalc using sheet-defined functions (SDFs). We also examine differences in their type system, language constructs and syntax. The report unveils that Funcalc is able to express 16 SISAL programs of varying complexity taken from a tutorial on SISAL. Prior work has also demonstrated Funcalc’s expressiveness by translating Excel financial functions to Funcalc. The comparison is one-way from SISAL to Funcalc so we do not concern ourselves with SISAL’s ability to express Funcalc SDFs. We highlight cases where it is either difficult or impossible to translate from SISAL to Funcalc.