> I think you've confused what mutable state is. Absolutely not. Macros provide shared mutable state. Macros are used pervasively in spreadsheet programming.

> I think you've confused what mutable state is. Absolutely not. Macros provide shared mutable state. Macros are used pervasively in spreadsheet programming. You cannot carte blanc ignore macros without some serious explanation. > The modal of computation of a spreadsheet is pretty much stateless. Relative references means semantics depend on code layout, which in most hygenic circumstances is an old-school GOTO. In truly awful uses, relative references recover the sort of code layout dependencies which even C avoids. This can definitely be even worse than shared mutable state.