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> You see, when formulas create a circular reference, Excel will run that computation up to a number of times.

Like almost every spreadsheet before it: Lotus 1-2-3, Borland Quattro Pro, VP Planner ...

Spreadsheets iterating on circ references goes back to the 1980s.

The first spreadsheet application, VisiCalc, didn't track dependencies: it evaluated cells left to right, top to bottom, IIRC.

Microsoft had a product called Multiplan that competed with VisiCalc. Not sure if that did iteration.

I think it used to be a setting in some programs whether circular references are flagged as errors, or iterate. Maybe it's still that way in Excel?



There are a couple of nice minimal spreadsheets in js:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130606222859/http://thomasstree...

Inspired by that, an even smaller one: https://jsfiddle.net/ondras/hYfN3/

The latter catches circular references rather than trying to calculate the fixpoint




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