RE: [office-formula] serial number? Don't we mean serial date?

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

"Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org> wrote on 01/28/2010 
06:49:57 PM:

> 
> RE: [office-formula] serial number? Don't we mean serial date?
> 
> Yes, I have been arguing for two ambient properites (nice term), 
> 

I took the term from how Microsoft describes OLE/ActiveX controls.  There, 
an ambient property is a exposed by the control container (the thing you 
are embedding a control in) and defines things like UI locale, background 
color, default font, etc., -- the things you need to know to make a 
control blend in well in a given container.

There is an analogous case here, where we have a container, abstractly at 
least, where the formula evaluator is embedded. The context provided by 
the container will include things like locale, date origin, etc.  We 
should probably start tracking a list of these items. What are all the 
things a formula evaluator needs to know about other than the text of the 
formula itself?  What are the parameters of our abstract machine?

-Rob