Re: [office-formula] It's okay to use UNICODE name as a standard spreadsheet function

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi David,

On Monday, 2007-03-05 10:50:59 -0500, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> I just got an email from the Unicode Consortium, below.  They say there is no problem naming a function "UNICODE".  Since Gnumeric already does this, I'm of a mind to continue the practice (and with a corresponding UNICHAR).  That means there's a corresponding UNICHAR.

Nice to hear. And thanks for clarifying!

> The main alternative would be to name this function "ICODE" (for
> "International Code"), which would produce a corresponding "ICHAR". An
> advantage of this would be to emphasize the international nature of
> this; really this only involves the standard character encoding agreed
> upon between ISO 10646 and the Unicode Consortium.  I'm fine with
> ICODE/ICHAR too; really, the main reason to use UNICODE/UNICHAR would
> be simply consistency with past practice. Another is that many
> developers are familiar with Unicode (the term "international" can be
> a little ambiguous, since there are past multi-nation specifications
> like Latin-1 that aren't the same thing).

Implementor's will also more likely find some software library that
supports a specific Unicode(TM) standard (say Unicode 5.0) than
something like "ISO/IEC 10646:2003 plus Amendment 1, Amendment 2, and
part of Amendment 3" ...

> Anyone who cares either way, please speak up. ASAP.

I suggest we stick with UNICODE/UNICHAR.

  Eike

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