Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--b1d2c6-Now, a few years ago somebody/en

Now, a few years ago somebody had a US patent &mdash; maybe it's expired by now &mdash; on natural order recalculation in spreadsheets. Now, what does this mean? It means the original spreadsheets did the recalculation always from top to bottom. Which meant that if a cell ever depended on a lower cell, then it wouldn't get recalculated the first time; you'd have to do another recalculation to get that one. Clearly it's better to do the recalculation in the order, you know. If A depends on B, then do B first and then do A. This way a single recalculation will make everything consistent. Well, that's what the patent covered.