Re: [office-formula] Proposal: Drop "huge" group; anycriticallymissing functions for "large"?

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca>]

On Thu, 2006-27-07 at 11:32 -0700, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> Andreas J Guelzow said:
> > GNumeric has two functions called
> > BINOMDIST(x,n,p,FALSE) and R.DBINOM(x,n,p,FALSE)
> > that both supposedly do the same thing...
> >From a mathematical point of view BINOMDIST has serious issues,
> >for example:
> > BINOMDIST(0.5,10,0.2,FALSE) is 0.107 rather than 0
> > BINOMDIST(11,10,0.2,FALSE) is an Error rather than 0
> 
> Thanks!  Perfect!
> 
> That was the point of my request.  I don't think that the
> "large" set should include all of Gnumeric's functions, some of
> which are very specialized.  But a few of those functions
> (at least their semantics) probably _do_ belong in a general-purpose
> office suite spreadsheet application.  I had noted BITAND
> specifically in my message, as you can see.  The semantic
> issues that you raise are absolutely critical, too. So let's
> identify the functions and semantic issues, and address them.

Would it be acceptable or at least up for discussion to change the
semantic of functions such as BINOMDIST so that they makes more
mathematical sense? (The Gnumeric developers do receive requests to
change the semantic of Gnumeric's implementation of function such as
BINOMDIST to that end. So far we refused since we viewed it as important
to have the same semantic as the other spreadsheets using that name.)

Andreas  
-- 
Andreas J. Guelzow, Professor
Dept. of Mathematical & Computing Sciences
Concordia University College of Alberta