Re: [office-formula] Semantics

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi Tomas,

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 13:01:30 +0100, Tomas Mecir wrote:

> > > I realise that I may be playing a devil's advocate here a bit :)
> > What for? Those functions work on numbers, text isn't a number. I wish
> > all function parameters / operands to numeric operators would behave
> > like that..
> 
> Sounds a bit like someone being lazy -hum-. ;) Y'know, I think this
> could be considered that geeky approach, which we wanted to avoid.

Geeky? I'd call it geeky if the application guesses around, mostly gets
it right, and the few times where it doesn't pass unnoticed by the user.

> Do the users want to care about whether something that obviously must
> be a number, isn't a number due to it being in a text-formatted cell,
> or something like that ?

Of course users don't want to care. Users just want "do what I mean". If
the application then guesses wrong on what they mean they blame it on
the application.


> > > Isn't this what OpenFormula has been doing so far ? With tests being
> > > adjusted for OOo to pass them and all ...
> >
> > Well, thanks for the flowers, but with the big player I wasn't referring
> > to OOo ;-)
> 
> Well I think OOo's approach of formulas is staying compatible with MS
> Office, so hey. Of course, I could be terribly wrong.

Mostly it does. Regarding these text-as-number issues not always, in OOo
=SUM(A1:A2) is identical to =A1+A2 if there is interpretable text in
A1:A1, in Excel the result is different.


> > I don't consider ignoring text in a range to be SUM'ed dirty. Not at
> > all.
> 
> Even if the text is "3" ?

No. What if it is "３"?


  Eike