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

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

Andreas J. Guelzow:
>Things change if we decide to drop "huge" from the first version of an
>OpenFormula standard. Under those circumstances ...
>the standard reflects only the functions implemented by
>Excel and OpenOffice.org. I hope you see the difference.

Yes, I do, and I'm actually very sensitive to that issue.
I do _NOT_ want to "lock out" other applications.
That is why "large" is NOT strictly just the union
of Excel and OpenOffice.org.  "Large" contains a few functions
(such as GAMMA) that are in NEITHER Excel NOR OpenOffice.org,
but _ARE_ in other applications. They are there
specifically so that users of OTHER applications can easily
transition their documents.  That's also why I'm asking for the
short list of "functions from other applications", to
help their users transition.  It cannot be a grocery list,
but a small list to help many people move right away to a common
language is a good thing.

I believe that we need to work in stages, and
release a version that (1) is useful for many and
(2) is a solid basis for future work.  The obvious place to do that
is by releasing the "large" group.  The more I look at the
"huge" list, the more I'm realizing that it will take a LONG
time to complete.  It'd be better to have a good spec that
suffices for many, and then work the next version... as long
as the initial spec serves as a good foundation.
What would be BAD would be a spec that imposed some requirement
that INTERFERED with the "huge" applications.

This would mean that if SAVEWHALES() is in Gnumeric, it can still
be exchanged as ORG.GNUMERIC.SAVEWHALES, and other applications are
free to implement it even while only version 1.0 is available.

--- David A. Wheeler