Re: [office-comment] Text in OpenFormula - inadequate forinternational use

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

Alex Brown:
> Now I don't see how encoding comes into it. For an ODF host the encoding will be opaque to the XML processor and hence to the application so by the time the data arrives at the function, all memory of how it was encoded in the document will be irrelevant or lost. This kind of limit needs to be expressed in the document format, not in OF, surely?
> 
> The letter "A" could have been encoded as the (ASCII-compatible) text sequence A for example. I don't see how or why OpenFormula needs to care about that.

There are at least two encodings:
* Encodings of text at rest (stored in a document), which are handled by XML
* Encodings of text when stored in memory, inside an evaluator.  This may not be, and is often NOT, the same.  If an implementation uses 32 bits per character, then it can do easy random access.  I don't know of any implementations that do this, but instead do all sorts of weird stuff.

It shouldn't matter what encoding(s) an evaluator uses as long as it can get the right answer.  But the encodings an evaluator supports determine whether they CAN get a right answer.

--- David A. Wheeler