Re: Updated openformula spec posted!

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi David,

On Fri, Aug 04, 2006 at 14:30:58 -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> The optional '$$' prefix was discussed recently
> in earlier mailing list discussions on named expressions.

Ah, I'll go through that this week.

> Check your spam box; several messages have been caught in my spam filters,
> and they may have been caught in yours.

I don't have a personal spam box anymore on this account. The company
wide anti-spam system works different. It seems to be conservative,
I still get enough of spam ;)

I'm puzzled though why your mails made it to the OASIS list and my reply
didn't. This Cc-party thing to work around a non-working mailing list is
ugly anyway.

> > I see that it might be
> > good as a disambiguator, but such things will ensure that no current
> > version of applications supporting ODF already will be able to read the
> > new ODFF formulas.
> 
> No, there's no such problem, it's completely backwards-compatible.

Ok, nice to hear :-)

> Applications may have to make at a change for openformula, anyway:
> they'll need to accept formula attributes starting directly with "=",
> instead of (say) oooc:.  I suspect many apps ALREADY do that,
> but I'm not certain.  Has anyone tested?

Current OOo does it. Some unpatched older (before 2.0.1 or so) versions
don't.

> Speaking of backwards compatibility: so far there's been no
> rule so far REQUIRING that all function names will be necessarily
> identical with OOo.

Of course not. Where necessary we may have to choose specifications that
are not backwards compatible. For obvious reasons I just try to avoid
them, or at least find ways to not break old versions completely.

  Eike

-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's list.