Once again ... aaaas always ... the last word is yours.<g
--

Regards,

RD
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"Harlan Grove" wrote in message
ups.com...
Ragdyer wrote:
You're skirting the issue Harlan!

I misspoke.
....

I wasn't skirting the issue. You were being sloppy. I pointed that out.
You got defensive, and you're still in CYA mode.

You mentioned number of entries as the fubar of an A:A range.

All I said was it has to be more complex then that.
Come on ... 256 compared to 65,535!

It's not complex, it's so simple it's almost laughable. 0-65535 is the
range of unsigned 16-bit (short) integers. (Speculation, but supported
by comments made by Gnumeric developers) Excel uses short integers
internally when iterating through arrays. Excel has no problem
iterating through millions of entries in individual arrays as long as
both dimensions are less then 65536. Just try

=SUMPRODUCT(ROW(1:65535)+65535*(COLUMN(A:BH)-1))

and compare the result to Gauss's formula for the sum of 65535*60
sequential integers starting from 1

=(65535*60)*(65535*60+1)/2

The dependence on short integers and 16-bit manuipulations using
bitwise operators is the main reason Excel will remain stuck with 65536
rows. Why it's still stuck with 256 columns is a better question since
there's nothing special and certainly no built-in support for 24-bit
(256 = 2^8 by 65536 = 2^16 = 2^24) integers.

It'd REQUIRE a new file format AND a fairly thorough rewrite of most of
Excel's source code to break through the 65536 row limit. Unless
Microsoft Office's market share drops under 60%, I don't see Microsoft
expending the resources to do it. The hopeful news is that as soon as
OpenOffice 2.0 hits production, some of the Calc developers may begin
to explore expanding Calc's worksheet cell count. If so, and if that
makes it into the OOo 3.0 design specs, we may be only a few years away
from Microsoft being forced (kicking & screaming) to devote serious
developer resources to a true major upgrade for Excel. It'd be the
first true major upgrade since Excel 2000 (OLAP, VBA6, major pivot
table improvements - vs 2002 with colored worksheet tabs and PITA
'Smart'Tags, or 2003 with fixes to problems with some stats functions
that were brought to Microsoft's attention over a decade ago).