Re: [office-formula] DATEVALUE and TIMEVALUE with full DateTimesupport

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

I said:
> > However, I think there needs to be a way to access the value without the chopping-off behavior.  I believe that everyone's VALUE() implementations already do this; is that correct?

Eike Rathke:
> At least it SHOULD. Excel and OOo do, but Gnumeric 1.4 and Kspread 1.4
> don't. So far we didn't require that. Should we make that a SHOULD or
> a SHALL?
> Done with a SHALL for now, unless someone objects. 

I think a SHALL is appropriate.  Otherwise, there will be no portable way to convert a string of the form "DATE TIME" into an unchopped number value.  Excel and OOo already do it, and as Andreas noted, the Gnumeric folks should be willing to change.  I can't imagine why the KSpread folks would object, though if there's a reason I'd love to konw.

> While speaking of ISO
> 8601 formats in those functions: ISO specifies an optional 'T' between
> date an time, to make the string one word for processing, where humans
> usually write a blank instead. OOo supports the 'T' separator, but no
> other application seems to. Should we make that a SHOULD? I now did so.

At least a SHOULD, I think.  Does the ISO standard _require_ supporting the 'T' when separating the date and time? If so, that's an argument for requiring such support - actually supporting the REAL standards is a big advantage of this spec, and I'd like to continue that trend unless there's a reason not to.

We'll need to add tests to check for all this, esp. since we KNOW of implementations that don't do this.

--- David A. Wheeler