Objectives for OpenFormula

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings,

To follow up on my last post rather quickly, I think I have discovered 
one source of my uneasiness with the current formula draft.

I sense that the OpenFormula draft is attempting to define conforming 
applications separate and apart from conformance to the expressions, 
operators/functions that it does define.

That may not be its intent but I get that impression from any number of 
statements in the prose that talk about implementations or applications 
separate and apart from matters of syntax and semantics.

Defining limits for an application and how it meets those separate and 
apart from some given syntax seems to me to be a completely different 
question than defining the syntax and semantics of expressions, 
operators/functions.

To be honest I am not really sure how one would go about specifying such 
limits (I know such standards exist, they just aren't on my reading 
schedule) without specifying an abstract layer higher than the syntax we 
have in OpenFormula such that an application could conform to it, 
without regard to the syntax that it accepts.

While I readily admit that could be very interesting I am not sure that 
is the purpose of defining an expression language, operators/functions 
for OpenDocument.

That is to say that OpenFormula should define the syntax and semantics 
for use in OpenDocument or any other application that wishes to apply 
the syntax and semantics as defined by OpenFormula. That isn't the same 
task as a higher level abstraction that is then, at least partially, 
expressed in the current OpenFormula syntax.

If that is acceptable, there are some fairly immediate consequences for 
the current formula draft:

1. All references to applications/implementations are removed 
(conformance statements for applications can still occur in the 
conformance chapter)

2. Where #1 states capacity requirements for syntax or semantics, those 
are restated as such.

3. Once the conversion to statements of capacity is done, the draft 
needs to be checked for consistency of the capacities declared. (With 
due notice of the floor-ceiling discussion for interoperability.)

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)