Re: [office-formula] CODE and CHAR should not be Unicode aware, proposing UNICODE and UNICHAR

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi David,

On Friday, 2007-02-16 12:13:42 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> > [... spec that CODE and CHAR use cp1252 ...]
> 
> Hmm.  I understand your rationale, but I disagree with it.
> 
> As you note, we lose functionality on the Mac, and I don't think Macs are disappearing this year.  I also think this fails even on Windows.  Windows usees the Windows-1252 charset in the U.S. and most West European countries, but I think it is NOT the default on Windows in other countries.

Other regions use different code pages. Failure is of course not limited
to Windows vs. Mac documents, failure is guaranteed between different
code pages, independent of operating system. I just made this
distinction because US-Excel online help said so.

So yes, regarding portable documents actually no code page makes sense..

> So I think we should NOT require cp1252, though I don't have any
> problem with _encouraging_ the use of cp1252 in this case if there's
> no obvious alternative.

In that case also encouraging cp1252 isn't helpful.

> Instead, I think this should be the "standard"
> way to gain access to the underlying platform and locale-specific
> information, whatever that is.

Ok, implementation-defined.


> > > The term "Unicode" is probably a trademark of the Unicode Consortium,
> 
> I've separately sent an email to a lawyer, to find out how to work this out.  I'm not a lawyer... I want the lawyers to work that out.

Whew, thanks.

  Eike

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