Re: [office-formula] Formula Terminology

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Andreas,

Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 17:29 -0500, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
>   
>> 2) What happens if the constraints are violated?
>>
>> Compare to RATE():
>>
>>  If Nper is 0 or less than 0, the result is an error.
>>
>> Do we really mean to say that constraint violations are errors in some 
>> functions, but not in others?
>>     
>
> please see  5.2: "If a constraint is not met, the function/operator
> should return an Error unless otherwise noted." This issue comes up
> again and again. I guess that is the drawback of mentioning common
> properties and behaviour only once!
>
>   
Made me curious about "error" and so:

5.4.5 Infix Operator "/" - "Dividing by zero returns an Error.

Note that this operator is reported to have Constraints: *none*

5.4.12 Infix Operator Reference Intersection ("!")

> If for all intersections there are no cells in common and the result 
> list is empty, error #NULL! is returned.
>
5.5.3 MINVERSE

> If the matrix is not invertible, this function *should* return an 
> error value.
>
That is just a sampling.

Please assign the issue to me.

I am less certain about the resolution, although obviously we need to be 
consistent, sometimes the difference in what is said may be meaningful.

Suggest that we add an issue to JIRA to make a special effort to check 
the use of "error."

Hope you are having a great evening!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)