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Subject: Re: [office-comment] Need more detailed definitions for formulas
David, David A. Wheeler wrote: >>>Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote: >> >>What I said is not that it wouldn't be useful or even required to get a >>common standard for formulas within office application, but that this is >>outside the scope of this TC, at least for the moment. From the office >>file format view, formulas are some kind of programming model that is >>very similar to scripts, and even may make use of scripts. For these >>programming models, the Open Office TC can only establish methods to >>uniquely identify programmimng models (that's what the namespaces do), >>but cannot standardize the programming models themselves. > > > I think you're unnecessarily conflating "programming models" with "formulas". > To be useful, the specification needs to specify a minimum > interoperable format for exchanging formulas that may use a > set of standard functions. This specification does NOT need to > define ANY way to define new functions; you can leave that out > for a useful spec. I'm not sure about this. A formula can only be interpreted by an application if it is fully understood. If there is only a set of standard functions then this is not sufficient.to interpret a formula, because the non-standard function are still not known. Specifying a useful set of standard functions itself already seems to be a challange. From its complexity, I would consider the definition of an office application formula language as complex as specifying a programming language together with a base framework. For this reason, it seems to be a better choice, at least for me, to keep the full specification of formulas separate but uniquely identify what "function language" is used than specifying a function language that does not meet the requirements of office applications. However, the TC will take your concern serious and may come back to this topic in a later stage. Best regards Michael
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