RE: [office-formula] OFFICE-2164: EASTERSUNDAY

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

I have some concerns about making a composite function like that.  There
become versioning issues around additions and around corrections because of
an error in any of them.  I think it would be more useful to have them
separated, at least into cohesive families.

In the particular case of EASTERSUNDAY or WESTERN-EASTER, there are a
variety of other observance dates that can be derived directly from that one
without requiring additional functions.  There may well be similar secondary
derivations of other observance dates that will minimize the number of
functions involved.  

Having the year date included is certainly useful, although knowing the
calendar might be more useful in some cases.  If we go seriously into this I
can see things like VETERANSDAY-OBSERVANCE-US(yyyy) developing.  Saints
preserve us [;<).

Perhaps this is an occasion for polishing-up a function-extension mechanism
that provides for unambiguous identification of [user-installed] third-party
supplemental-function implementations.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: robert_weir@us.ibm.com [mailto:robert_weir@us.ibm.com] 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-formula/200910/msg00009.html
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 09:14
To: office-formula@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office-formula] OFFICE-2164: EASTERSUNDAY

I'm looking at this from a "linguistic and cultural adaptability" 
perspective, which is an ISO/IEC requirement.  There are two dates where 
Easter is celebrated, if you consider as well the Eastern Orthodox 
observance.  And then there are all the other holidays which have movable 
dates in various religions and cultures which base such dates on a lunar 
calendar.

I wonder whether the approach is to have a function called HOLIDAY(String 
name, Number year), which you could call as:

HOLIDAY("Easter", 2009)

or 

HOLIDAY("Easter-Orthodox", 2009)

or

HOLIDAY("Passover", 2010)

We could reserve strings for the major observances and then allow 
implementation-defined extensions.

-Rob


Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com> wrote on 10/26/2009 11:28:12 AM:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-formula/200910/msg00007.html
[ ... ]