Implementing alternate "compatibility" functions (such as 0^0 = ERROR)

[Michael Meeks]

On Thu, 2013-02-21 at 21:50 -0600, Norbert Thiebaud wrote:
> The issue is purely academic, but if it _has_ to be resolved then yes
> a compatibility mode has a much better value that creating an
> 'alternate' function.

	True - though clearly there is some residual benefit in importing ODF
files with this sort of function in them - luckily there is a ~zero
deployed-base of that so far.

	As a general yard-stick, we take function compatibility with Excel
extremely seriously - it is clearly imperative to our users to have
confidence that their spreadsheets continue to work as they move to the
world of ODF implementations.

	Having said that - when it comes to corner-cases we have much bigger
problems in this area than this issue. One example would be the absence
of a true 'boolean' type in our core; such that when you run the
gnumeric test sheet here:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnumeric/plain/samples/excel/operator.xls

	you can ponder at length whether: '=TRUE() > "Liz"' should be true or
false for example ;-)

	So - IMHO there is little value at all in further discussion on this
topic, and backwards-compatibility with ODF + numeric sanity trumps the
corner-case at least until we have a much more consistent set of
corner-case solutions.

	But of course, I would defer to the calc team; and as Tor and Norbert
says - -strongly- discourage an endless bike-shed on this from those
outside the set of people who have already contributed code to calc.

	All the best :-)

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot