CONVERT

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi,

6.14.17 CONVERT has

| TODO: There are two different “CONVERT” functions, Excel's and
| OpenOffice.org's, which have completely different semantics.   OO.org
| also has Excel's, but by a different name.  Need to determine what to
| name those two functions, as well as document their semantics.

I suggest to have both, CONVERT and CONVERT_E.

The OOo CONVERT function takes an amount and two arbitrary units as
arguments, for which a conversion factor can be defined in the shared or
the user configuration, with some predefined factors for conversions
between Euro and the old currencies. However, it is not restricted to
monetary conversion as long as a single factor is sufficient to do the
conversion.

The Excel CONVERT_E function knows some conversions that are not
expressible as single factors, such as between temperatures that have
a linear offset, and does some matching on symbols of decimal
(sub)multiples of units (p,cm,m,k,...). On the other hand it doesn't
know anything about currencies and is not extendible.

  Eike

-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's list.