Re: [office-formula] USDOLLAR

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

Andreas J. Guelzow:
> I am with Eike on this one:
> $ is _not _ the US-Dollar symbol. So a function returning the dollar
> symbol (for example also used for the canadian or australian dollar)
> shoudl be called DOLLAR.

Sure.

> Of course that symbol is already used to return
> the YEN symbol.
> 
> I do not understand the point of having a function such as DOLLAR  that
> gives different currency strings depending on locale. So you take a
> spreadsheet that talks about US dollars and open it in japanese locale
> and voila now all dollar signs become yen signs. I sure hope the numbers
> change to go along with the change in currency symbol.

Eike:
>I actually made a serious error: I trusted the Ecma/Excel spec. That says USDOLLAR would use the format $#,##0.00;($#,##0.00) whereas DOLLAR explicitly specifies that different formats are used. I now connected to some Windows servers, and both, Excel 2003 and Excel 2007, treat USDOLLAR completely locale dependent. It seems USDOLLAR is just an alias of DOLLAR, if there aren't subtle differences.

>If it was locale-independent I'd consider it even more dangerous (see .sig) in case applications automatically convert text to numbers.

>Btw, in Excel, the (US)DOLLAR functions give nice opportunities to play nasty if you switch to proper locales before reloading a carefully crafted document. Left as an exercise to the reader ;-) 

This is truly hideous. Nasty screw-ups like this make me want to take a shower.

Okay, you guys have convinced me.  Let's leave that out of the standard set; people can implement COM.MICROSOFT.USDOLLAR if they wish.

--- David A. Wheeler