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Subject: Re: [office-comment] Need more detailed definitions for formulas


> > Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
> What I said is not that it wouldn't be useful or even required to get a 
> common standard for formulas within office application, but that this is 
> outside the scope of this TC, at least for the moment. From the office 
> file format view, formulas are some kind of programming model that is 
> very similar to scripts, and even may make use of scripts. For these 
> programming models, the Open Office TC can only establish methods to 
> uniquely identify programmimng models (that's what the namespaces do), 
> but cannot standardize the programming models themselves.

I think you're unnecessarily conflating "programming models" with "formulas".
To be useful, the specification needs to specify a minimum
interoperable format for exchanging formulas that may use a
set of standard functions.  This specification does NOT need to
define ANY way to define new functions; you can leave that out
for a useful spec.

But as I surf through the specification, the amount of the
specification that REQUIRES formula processing becomes larger,
not smaller.  For example, the word processing portion
includes variables that can be computed.  Er... how are you
going to do that, without a way to evaluate formulas?

Thus, I don't see a conflict at all.  The TC can leave out
"programming models" from its initial specification; that means that
there may not be a standard way to define NEW functions.
But the TC should NOT leave out a standard way to evaluate
functions; it needs to define that, and a common set of
functions (like SUM).

--- David A. Wheeler


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