Re: [office-formula] List of functions in OpenFormula, dealingwith LEGACY.*

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca>]

On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 14:13 +0200, Eike Rathke wrote:
> > > > LEGACY.NORMSDIST => NORMSDIST
> > > >   where NORMSDIST(x) = NORMDIST(x;0;1;TRUE())
> > > >   since this is also well-defined and useful
> > > 
> > > I disagree here. In fact I could see much more reason for dropping
> > > LEGACY.NORMSDIST completely rather than turning it into a non-legacy
> > > function. After the above change with respect to the default values of
> > > NORMDIST,
> > > 
> > > NORMSDIST(x) = NORMDIST(x)
> 
> This indeed doesn't make much sense.
> 
> > > As a consequence there is no reason why, in the file format, we would
> > > distinguish between NORMSDIST and NORMDIST. While NORMSDIST would could
> > > exist in some legacy MS Excel files, when the file is converted to
> > > openformula format NORMSDIST could (should) just be translated into
> > > NORMDIST.
> 
> I don't like that idea. It poses extra work on implementors when storing
> Excel files and legacy ODF files as new ODF formula. I propose to stick
> with LEGACY.NORMSDIST here. We included LEGACY.NORMSDIST to ease
> implementation of ODFF, do we want to leave that road for an idealistic
> clean room spec?

I have no issue with keeping LEGACY.NORMSDIST. There are lots of things
that don't make sense to me bu t with which I can live. I just don't
think having bot a NORMSDIST (without LEGACY prefix) and NORMDIST is one
of them.
> 
> > > It really does not make sense to have two versions of the same function,
> > > even if one of them can be called with additional arguments.
> 
> We also included LOG10 for interoperability, where LOG10(x) == LOG(x).
> Do we want to kick all that out now?

I think this specific situation, is a touch different: For NORMDIST(x)
everybody will know that this is the standard normal distribution since
te mean and std dev are not specified. With LOG(x) on the other hand,
some will assume that this is the natural logarithm (which it ought to
be imho) while others that it is the base 10 logarithm (which it
apparently is). So I can see the usefulness of having it spelt out as
LOG10(x).
> 

Andreas
>