RE: [oic] TIME function in ODF vs OOXML

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <andreas.guelzow@concordia.ab.ca>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2012-05-22 at 12:50 -0600, John Haug wrote:
> However, in reading what ODF says about TIME, I’m not convinced what
> the right answer is – it’s underspecified.
> 
>  
> 
> The relevant parts of 6.10.17 TIME are (ODF 1.2):
> 
> Semantics: Returns the fraction of the day consumed by the given time,
> i.e.: ((hours*60*60)+(minutes*60)+seconds)/(24*60*60)

> “Returns the fraction of the day” seems to imply the number should be
> a fractional value of 1.  The definition of “Time” doesn’t help any.
> The entirety of 4.3.2 Time is:

Looking only at the first half the semantics description one could
possibly argue that it is underspecified, but the second part (i.e. ==
"id est" == "that is") gives a mathematical formula for the values which
specifies the return value completely. The whole point of including the
formula is to avoid issue with arguing what a "fraction of the day
consumed by the given time" is. 

> 
> My understanding is that the intent of the formula subcommittee was to
> create something compatible with in-market implementations as much as
> possible, so I’d think that if this had been found before 1.2 was
> completed it probably would have defined specific results for values
> between 0 and 24 hours and then left values larger than 24 hours
> implementation dependent.  Hopefully with some comment about some
> implementations using a modulo and others simply dividing.

I believe the whole point of the public review is that implementors
could point out issue such as this. Unfortunately nobody did (and
especially whoever decided to change the openoffice.org/Apache
OpenOffice implementation should have raised this issue with the TC.

> That seems the best thing to do, to me.  Interop advisory, bug fix in
> ODF?

That really would not be a bug fix but a incompatible change. The
semantics given in ODF 1.2 gives a mathematical expression for the
return value that does not permit two interpretations, especially since
it is noted that the hour/minute/second values are not restricted so teh
formula will give values outside of the 0 to 1 range.

Andreas


-- 
Andreas J. Guelzow, PhD, FTICA
Concordia University College of Alberta

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