Re: [office-formula] VALUEL parameters?

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

I'm not sure this is going to work in
general.  There are calendars supported by Excel for example which
don't use simple constant delimiters for dates.  In any case, is it
enough to say the date separator is '-' and then allow 01-01-06 as well
as Jan-01-06?  Things get tricker in East Asian locales, where you
need to deal with things like traditional Japanese dates, based on the
imperial era, where today is H18.7.18.  With currency we would need
to handle that some currencies put the symbol before the number, others
after.  Numbers need to deal with thousands separators as well as
decimal separators since they are reversed in some locales.  That's
the stuff that comes to my mind, but I'm not an expert in this area.  
 It can get very complicated.  No one wants to reinvent this
stuff.

Also, I'm not sure the cost for implementers
to know all locales is really that high.  Support is built-in to Java,
and ICU4C is available on 25 platforms, so any implementation that wants
to support all locales can do so.

-Rob


"David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>
wrote on 07/18/2006 07:14:58 PM:

> We do have one committee invention here, VALUEL, to handle
> the problem that there seems to be no gentle way to deal with
> internationalized values.  The first version had "locale",
but that
> requires all implementors to know all locales.. not practical.
> 
> We have a new proposal:
> VALUEL( v; decimalseparator [[;groupseparator [;dateseparator]] ...
)
> I think that's the better APPROACH, but we need the right list
> of parameters.  Can anyone look at what's required to fully
> internationalize VALUE, so that we can have the right parameters listed?
> 
> --- David A. Wheeler