What I really want is to be able to pass cell ranges (as opposed to the contents copied into arrays) around freely between Calc and Basic - but that would raise HUGE backward-compatibility issues, so I’m quite confident it won’t happen.
(Before I switched to Linux I had rewritten a number of Excel’s built-in functions that return the value of a cell, to instead return the cell. I needed that quite often.)
As a second choice, can the spreadsheet Cell() function be extended - or another function created - that will take a range and return the full name of the range as a string? I don’t want to just type the string, because =SomeFunctionOf(Cell(“Range”,A1:C5)) is a reference to the indicated cells and will be re-called if anything in the range changes; =SomeFunctionOf(“Sheet1.A1:C5”) is not.
If you do this, please make the format of the resulting string as consistent as possible for easy parsing - always include filename and sheet name - and compatible with the Indirect() function.
Alongside that, pretty much any Calc function that isn’t directly available in Basic, please make it available in Basic.