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Subject: Re: [office-comment] OpenFormula: Are spreadsheet makers willingto switch to Excel semantics?
Chin Chee-Kai wrote: > I think you appear to be pressing on all the sensitive > points here through a lot of hard work. As you said, > the Excel formula isn't quite documented, at least to the > outside world. Would the aim (of OF) then be to > reverse-engineer Excel's formula and semantic behavior > and serialize it into a open specification? Essentially yes, at least in the sense that any current Excel user should have a simple path to transition to it, while having their spreadsheets continue to work. > As admirable > as all your hourless investigation seems, it would seem > to be not very productive, nor even feasible, to perform > such a task. You did some work on identifying boolean, > string and numerical conversions, but what about conversions > between pairs of all other types? To be complete, one would > need to find out the actual behaviors of all position-ordered > pairs for all operators (eg. string+error, error+string, > boolean+float, date+string, date+integer, etc), which > may not be commutative due to types of parameters even > when mathematically they should be. That's correct. It turns out not to be as hard as you'd think. There are VERY few types. It turns out that "date" isn't a separate type; it's just a number (with a special format). So you have number, string, error, boolean, and "array". It's NOT easy, and I won't be able to do it by myself. But I can get it started. And the semantics do not need to be IDENTICAL to Excel... just enough similar so that people can exchange spreadsheets. > Further, assuming that it's done, the release of another > newer version of Excel will render the spec "incompatible" again. Actually, no. If Microsoft changes the semantics, someone's spreadsheet will fail to work, and since they're used for budgets & other things involving real money, there's strong incentive to NOT change a thing. Microsoft intentionally copied the general semantics from Lotus 1-2-3, which copied the semantics from VisiCalc. VisiCalc, of course, based its semantics on standard mathematical notation, as well as the FORTRAN/BASIC methods of ASCII-izing them. This is nothing new; there's a general conservatism in semantics for spreadsheets. > Please don't get me wrong; I only hope to share this > concern about the approach that you seem to have taken, and > don't wish to see that your hours are wasted (in my opinion). > > I'm happy to be corrected, but what I see now at least is that > if we have a "proper" OpenFormula, one which has an objective > of ensuring proper exchange of formulas with mathematical > correctness, and leave the onus of implementing this serialized > format to the software/applications, then the value-add for > the OpenFormula would be that senders & receivers know the > formulas encoded will be properly "rendered" into expected > mathematical functions in their local systems. With that then, > it wouldn't matter whether sender is a low-end 486 running older > version of Excel, and receiving side is an open-office spreadsheet > software with software-supported high-precision libraries, > the formulas will be understood properly and calculations will > be done correctly (or else errors flagged correctly). > > Isn't that what we want to see for OpenFormula? Yes. Indeed, I don't intend to specify precision levels (though in practice most people will use 64-bit IEEE doubles or better). --- David A. Wheeler
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