Re: [office-formula] Semantics

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi Tomas,

On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 11:54:31 +0100, Tomas Mecir wrote:

> >  Hmmm. What about DEFINING the text-conversion routines, to be
> > locale-independent ? This is about a file format, right ?

Correct.

> > The apps
> > WILL have to store numbers in a locale-neutral way - probably using
> > the US locale. So, why not make it so that text constants can get
> > auto-converted to numbers using only the english locale ?

Because you don't want to silently and automatically convert user's text
content to numeric content. At least you should not. User said it's
text, so let it be text. Otherwise you enter hell from the backdoor.

> >  a1: ="1"
> >  a2: ="5"
> >  a3: =a1&"."&a2
> >  a4: =1*a3
> >
> >  How do you make that locale independent? We will have similar problems with
> > dates.
> 
> I don't. I am proposing to achieve locale independency by pre-defining
> ONE locale, which would always be used to read documents.

That is the "C" locale, which is already used for all numeric content.
You still don't solve any string-to-number conversion issues with that.

  Eike