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Subject: RE: [office-formula] BITAND
Andreas J Guelzow <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca> wrote on 12/10/2009 02:16:56 PM: > Dennis, > could you explain to me what you see as the difference between the > following two statements (in the context of the OpenFormula > specification): > > 1) To comply with this specification, an implementation *shall* support > parameters of at least 48 bits. > > 2) An implementation *shall* support parameters of at least 48 bits. > Some observations: First, we should never be using the term 'comply' in the standard. Although you'll see it used loosely even if some standards settings, the general rule is you comply with legal requirements, such as to comply with a regulation. And you 'conform' to voluntary standards. But this may be moot, since as Andreas observed it is redundant. I suppose it could be worse. We could say, "This specification defines the requirement that to comply with this specification an implementation shall...." ;-) Second, we agreed, at least in principle, on the Tuesday call to have two conformance targets: 1) An OpenFormula 'formula' or 'expression' 2) An OpenFormula 'evalautor' or 'processor' One expresses the static/syntactic constraints and the other the runtime requirements. So whenever we state a conformance requirement we need to make sure it is clear what target it pertains to. This might be obvious from context in many cases. But in some cases we may need to be explicit. In this case I think it is obvious from context that this is a processor constraint. But if we want to make it explicit, we certainly could. In any case, it is odd to require 48 bit parameters in BITAND when we don't have any such requirement for the Number type in general. Is there some special reason why it would be a conformance requirement to support 48 bit params for BITAND, when operator '+' can be conformant with support for only 32-bit arguments? -Rob
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