Re: [office-formula] Chapter 4 Types

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi Patrick,

On Tuesday, 2009-01-20 14:32:26 -0500, Patrick Durusau wrote:

> Second, I think a much shorter, say a paragraph at most, discussion of  
> what lies within this chapter is more than sufficient. As written it  
> defines (or appears to define) rules for values, references, etc. All of  
> that can be done but needs to be done where appropriate. 
>
> I think part of my uncertainty is that most of this has been defined  
> before. The W3C Schema datatypes come to mind.  
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/)

These may be helpful in some cases, but would need close inspection in
detail. For example, our Number type essentially is
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#double but the restriction of the
canonical representation does not apply.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#string may be suited as well, but
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-xml-2e-20000814#dt-character excludes some
control characters and characters from the surrogate blocks (btw, why is
that?) that are not illegal in spreadsheet string context, see "5.4
Constant Strings".

> Or, ISO/IEC 11404:1996  
> (http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG11/docs/iso11404.pdf)

See below.

> (I am sure there are others, those just happen to be two that come to mind.)
>
> Granted there may be some datatypes that are not defined elsewhere that  
> we need but shouldn't we limit ourselves to defining only those?
>
> Broader question: What impact would applying the datatypes as defined in  
> ISO/IEC 11404:1996 have on the current function definitions? Are our  
> current definitions far enough from those to cause problems?

I don't see how the ISO 11404 definitions of datatypes and their
literals and operations would help here. Do you have anything specific
in mind?

  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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