RE: [office-formula] RE: Unit Prefixes in CONVERT

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

Eike, my bad.

I hadn't reread the definition carefully and I missed the text you quote.  I
already added a comment to the effect that you may have missed on the
related JIRA issue.

With regard to Patrick's note, I thought he was thinking that there was such
a characteristic of table cells, not realizing he was talking about cells in
the table of the specification.  (That is, he was referring to the unit
symbols in a way that I let myself be confused about.)

Does that clear this up?

At least we both agree how the example I gave works [;<).

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Eike Rathke [mailto:erack@sun.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 11:58
To: office-formula@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office-formula] RE: Unit Prefixes in CONVERT

Hi Dennis,

On Friday, 2010-04-09 08:29:25 -0700, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:

> If cells are not retained as dimensionless values we have a real problem
> with what formula =1.0 for the cell delivers to a subsequent
> CONVERT(n;from;to).  Perhaps, in that case, we would need something like
> CONVERT(N;;"km") which works if N is a dimensioned distance value and
fails
> if it isn't?  

There are no dimensioned cell values, there are numbers, numeric values.
Period.

> This ambiguity calls for a JIRA issue.  It is OFFICE-2629

There is no ambiguity.

And what exactly in
"Units (including both the unit symbol and the optional unit prefix) are
case-sensitive."
is misleading and causes you to say
"2. Specify whether the unit symbols are case-sensitive or not."?

How does
"A unit is a unit symbol, optionally preceded by a unit prefix"
lead you to
"3. Be clear that the prefixes apply to the unit symbols and nothing
else."?

What else could a prefix be applied to?


> Of course, there is limited capability of explicit unit tracking.  For
> example, in
> 
>    CONVERT(N;[A17];"km") where it happens that the value of [A17] is the
> text given by formula ="nly".

So what? CONVERT's 2nd parameter is "nly" then.

  Eike

-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO
statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's
list.