Re: [office-formula] LOOKUP function

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi,

On Monday, 2008-03-10 12:42:00 -0400, Kohei Yoshida wrote:

> > >   3) The lengths of the search vector and the result vector do not need 
> > >     to be identical; however, when the match position falls outside 
> > >     the length of the result vector, an error is raised if the result 
> > >     vector is given as an array object.  If it's a cell range, it gets 
> > >     automatically extended to the length of the searched vector.
> > [...]
> > >     If the cell range cannot be extended due to size limit, then '0'
> > >     is displayed.
> > 
> > How odd..
> 
> Yeah.  So, this is a corner case specific to one particular application.
> I'm not really sure if it's worthwhile to spec this, to be honest.

I just rewrote the LOOKUP definition to match the latest findings. This
last piece is missing. I think we should define to return an error in
this case, because returning 0 could be as bad as any other value.

Returning 0 may be the result of some "a not existing cell is an empty
cell" thinking. However, if a loaded document for example had more rows
than the application can handle, returning 0 for an off-limit access
could be plain wrong. Generating a NA() error would be more appropriate.

  Eike

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

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