Re: [office-formula] Implementation-defined, Unspecified, and Undefined behaviors in OpenFormula

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca>]

On 6/12/2009, "David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com> wrote:

>robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
>> Maybe I wasn't clear enough....
>>
>> A declarative approach means that implementation behavior can still vary,
>> but instead of documenting this behavior only in written documentation,
>> the behavior is documented in the XML itself.
>
>
>I think the main issue is really, "how important is this?".  If it's
>really important, then maybe we should mandate a specific answer.  If
>it's not important, then how far should we go?!?  Documenting the
>assumptions of a particular writer inside the XML file is an interesting
>alternative.
>
>Anyone else: Pro? Con?  Another alternative?
>
I think it is a really good idea to mandate in the file what
"implementation defined" behaviour was used in the creation of this
file.

This is in fact closely related to an important fact Doug made in an
earlier message:  changing mplementation behaviour is not just an issue
of whether it takes 5 or 1000 lines of code but it causes problems with
existing files. It is much easier to decide to change behaviour if it
weren't for the problem of how to handle existing files. If we mandate
that "implementation defined" behaviour is described in the file then
we even have a shot at possible changes later onbecause atleast we
canidentify which files are affected, and implementations may even
choose to accommodate files that have a different behaviour.

Andreas