Re: [office-formula] CODE and CHAR should not be Unicode aware, proposing UNICODE and UNICHAR

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi David,

On Thursday, 2007-02-15 13:16:41 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> I believe we still should include CODE and CHAR; they'll simplify round-tripping.

Sure, this wasn't meant to replace them.

> Spec'ing them is tricky; I think we should note that they are
> platform-dependent, and then state in both cases that "Portable
> documents SHALL NOT use this function, as it is fundamentally
> platform-dependent."
> 
> What's the point in having a standard but platform-dependent function?
> Well, it gives you a standard way to access the nonstandard junk
> underneath, if you need it.

That derived from the Excel behavior of using either Windows or Mac
character sets, and OOo extended it to system encodings. But for our
file format spec that behavior doesn't make sense, that's why I proposed
to spec that CODE and CHAR use cp1252. So CODE and CHAR exist for
interoperability with Excel, but we loose functionality for Excel
documents that originated on a Mac when we spec cp1252.

> The term "Unicode" is probably a trademark of the Unicode Consortium,
> but I expect that this would be considered a fair use in any country.

Sigh.. see http://unicode.org/policies/logo_policy.html#4
Could you please clarify with them whether having a function named
UNICODE in our spec would touch that legal stuff? In descriptive text
I guess we'll have to write Unicode^TM wherever we mention it and follow
those other rules of that page..

> ISO 10646 and Unicode are intentionally joined at the hip for their
> encoding values, but there might be someone in ISO 10646 who's unhappy
> that Unicode gets top billing here.  So I'd put this in the "UNICODE"
> text this rationale:

> Rationale: This function is named UNICODE because it has this name in at least one pre-existing applications, and it is the obvious name compared with CODE.

Will do.

> I'd also note that UNICODE "Returns the Unicode/ISO 10646 code" as its summary.

Given the legal blah I guess the correct wording would be "Returns the
character code according to the Unicode^TM Standard / ISO 10646".

> Eike: I'm assuming that you're creating/modifying all four (CODE, CHAR, UNICODE, UNICHAR), since you're the proposer.  Let me know if otherwise.

Yes, I'm working on it.

  Eike

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