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Subject: Re: [office-formula] Formula Terminology
On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 20:31 -0500, Patrick Durusau wrote: > Andreas, > > Andreas J. Guelzow wrote: > > On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 17:29 -0500, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote: > > > >> 2) What happens if the constraints are violated? > >> > >> Compare to RATE(): > >> > >> If Nper is 0 or less than 0, the result is an error. > >> > >> Do we really mean to say that constraint violations are errors in some > >> functions, but not in others? > >> > > > > please see 5.2: "If a constraint is not met, the function/operator > > should return an Error unless otherwise noted." This issue comes up > > again and again. I guess that is the drawback of mentioning common > > properties and behaviour only once! > > > > There are surely lots of places in the description where we should have constraints rather than talking about error returns. > Made me curious about "error" and so: > > 5.4.5 Infix Operator "/" - "Dividing by zero returns an Error. > > Note that this operator is reported to have Constraints: *none* This of course would be a perfect place for a constraint! > > 5.4.12 Infix Operator Reference Intersection ("!") > > > If for all intersections there are no cells in common and the result > > list is empty, error #NULL! is returned. This is really bad: We never define the #NULL! error (nor should we). In fact the only error that we require is #NA! > > > 5.5.3 MINVERSE > > > If the matrix is not invertible, this function *should* return an > > error value. I am not quite sure whether we can/should formulate this as a constraint. > > > That is just a sampling. I didn;t say that we should never talk about errors, but failure to satisfy a constraint should yield an error unless stated otherwise. > > Please assign the issue to me. > > I am less certain about the resolution, although obviously we need to be > consistent, sometimes the difference in what is said may be meaningful. > > Suggest that we add an issue to JIRA to make a special effort to check > the use of "error." > > Hope you are having a great evening! And I hope you do too! Andreas -- Andreas J. Guelzow Concordia University College of Alberta
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