Re: [office-formula] Semantics

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi robert_weir,

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 15:52:17 -0500, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:

> OK.  So someone who has a process that takes a table of conversion factors 
> from the web and pastes these into a spreadsheet and then uses automatic 
> string->number conversions to do a calculation would create a spreadsheet 
> which would work in one locale, but would break in another.

Exactly.


> This makes me think that we shouldn't spend to much time on this area. 
> Specify how it works today in OO (or Excel or whatever) and immediately 
> deprecate this feature in the grammar.

I'm more than fine with that. I just don't know if and how
a specification should say "hey, currently it may work like this, but
don't use it".

> I think we want to be promoting a 
> file format which encourages and supports the creation of formulas which 
> are invariant under locale changes.

Yes, please :-)

> Automatic string conversions considered dangerous.  They are the GOTO
> statements of spreadsheets.

Hey, that's a good one :-)  May I cite it in my .sig?

> We should probably make a whole list of stuff which we'll need to
> define for legacy application compatibility, but which we'll want to
> immediately deprecate. 

If we do so we may also need to define the transition from legacy to new
behavior/functionality/whatever. This can be hard and time consuming as
it probably will have to be done on a case-by-case basis.

  Eike