I don't think it's a bad idea either. You might not be able to reasonably support all features Excel has but you could still provide some value with a subset.

I don't think it's a bad idea either. You might not be able to reasonably support all features Excel has but you could still provide some value with a subset. I think this could be quite useful not so much when you're starting something from scratch necessarily but maybe you already have spreadsheets that implement some algorithm. In these cases having a compiler translate the spreadsheet would probably make more sense than having a human do it.