1. Introduction

SS is a batch spreadsheet processor for C programmers. It produces a spreadsheet display from plain text input files, similar to the way documents are created using LaTeX. The resulting display is not interactive. A shell script front-end is also provided for preprocessing (using the C preprocessor) and post-processing to generate HTML or graphics output.

SS includes all of the numeric operators from the C programming language, with the same syntax, precedence, and associativity as C. It also includes all of the functions from the C90 (ANSI/ISO 9899:1990) standard library math.h, all of the non-complex functions from the C99 standard library tgmath.h, as well as other numeric and range functions. It allows cycles and non-convergent iterative formulas.