RE: [office-formula] Conflict between Part 1 and Part 2

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

"Andreas J. Guelzow" <andreas.guelzow@concordia.ab.ca> wrote on 02/04/2010 
07:05:08 PM:

> 
> RE: [office-formula] Conflict between Part 1 and Part 2
> 
> On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 16:41 -0700, Eric Patterson wrote:
> > I think that puts us back where we started.  We use the null-date and
> > acknowledge that dates between 1-Jan and 28-Feb may be different.  No
> > further attributes are needed.  Anyone disagree to this strategy?
> 
> I do. 
> 
> I think an application should be able to legitimately discover whether a
> file it opens was created under the assumption that there is a skip in
> the number->date mapping before 1900/3/1 or not.
> 

So what are you proposing?  An attribute that indicates whether the 
authoring application had the *1900-02-29 date?  What behavior would be 
required by evaluators who process a formula where that attribute was set 
to true?  Or are you seeing this as being a "hint" only, with no required 
behavior?

There are other date-related bugs in spreadsheets.  If I type 0 into Excel 
and format it as a date, it displays "1/0/1900".  Do we need an attribute 
for that as well? 

-Rob


> As far as I am concerned having the standard suggest that one falsifies
> the null-date when saving is unacceptable. 
> 
> If for whatever reason people object to discoverability and want the
> difference in serial numbers for dates prior to 1900/3/1, then the
> null-date ought to be defined differently, by perhaps giving the date
> corresponding to serial=100.
> 
> Andreas
> 
> 
> -- 
> Andreas J. Guelzow <andreas.guelzow@concordia.ab.ca>
> Concordia University College of Alberta
> 
> 
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