Doing computations on sequences

[chombee <chombee nerdshack com>]

Sorry for the vague subject line. I'm new to spreadsheets, having never
really used one before, and am not really clear on what their
capabilities are.

I've looked through the tutorial and manual for gnumeric and also the
manual for openoffice calc and they confirmed that you can enter numbers
into columns and rows in spreadsheets and then have them do automatic
computations on columns and rows by specifying mathematical functions
with operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, division,
etc.

What I want is a little different. I have some large sets of sequences
of data. Each piece of data belongs to one of several classes, and I can
label each data by its class. So I could call the classes 1,2,3,4 or
A,B,C,D or whatever. The data I have are sequences of these classes, and
what I want to do is various comparisons of the sequences. Say for
example I have these two sequences:

1. A , D, F, G, H
2. D , C, B, A, Y

I want to be able to compute the answers to questions like:

* How many of the values in sequence 1 are also found in sequence 2?
* To what degree does sequence 2 contain the same values of sequence 1
_in the same order_?
* If sequence 2 contains letter X, does it later contain letter Y? (Yes,
No, or N/A).
* How often does letter C appear in all of the sequences?

And I want to be able to compute the answers to these over large numbers
of such sequences.

As you can see, these are more like logical computations than obvious
mathematical functions. At least, that's what they are to me. As I said
the data don't have to be letters A, B, C, I could represent them as
numbers or anything else. As long as each item has a unique symbol.

Is this the kind of computation that gnumeric can do for me? And if so,
can anyone give me a clue how I would get started inputting these sorts
of functions into gnumeric?

As I said, although I've read the manuals, I've never used a spreadsheet
before, and so I don't even know what they are capable of or appropriate
for.

Thanks